Quote:
Umberto Eco must be even more popular aborad that I expected, or you are very informed about Italy

Definitely the former, I'd say. He's the benefit of some really excellent translators; if the essay had stayed in Italian there's no way I'd have heard of it. He doesn't come across as terribly snobbish in the essays IMO (though he does in Foucault's Pendulum, all those damn chapter epigraphs in different languages with no translations). The breadth of vocabulary is astonishing, though... you find yourself reading his stuff in "the Umberto Eco position": book in one hand, dictionary in the other...

Peter