Final Umberto Eco book brought forward

The date of publication for Umberto Eco's "final book" has been pushed forward from May to this Friday (26th February), following the news of the Italian intellectual's death, aged 84.

The book, Pape Satan Aleppe: Chronicles of a Liquid Society, is a collection of essays which featured in an Italian weekly magazine, L'Espresso, since 2000. Contained in the title are the first three words of Canto 7 of Inferno, part of Dante Alighieri's 14th-century poem Divine Comedy.

It will be published by La Nave di Teseo, a new publishing house that was formed because writers feared a publishing monopoly by Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, owned by the family of former p.m. Silvio Berlusconi.

Eco said the collection was "sufficiently liquid to characterise the confusion of our times", as part of a summary of the book available on Amazon.

Italy’s culture minister, Dario Franceschini, tweeted yesterday that Eco was “a master who brought Italian culture to the whole world.”