The year 2026 will mark the 10th anniversary of Umberto Eco's death on 19 February 2016.

Ten years during which Eco himself had asked not to organise any conferences about him, so as to better determine and appreciate what to forget, what to keep, and what to build on.

Indeed, a decade is an adequate time span to allow culture to fulfil two of its essential functions, adopted by Eco as central themes of his essays: that of filtering knowledge, offering subsequent generations only that which deserves to be remembered, and of opening, or renewing, a text through new interpretations. Two actions that, alone, serve to appreciate what can and must remain.

This conference on the 10th anniversary of Eco's death, which the Alma Mater Studiorum - Università di Bologna is promoting through its Centro internazionale di Studi umanistici “Umberto Eco”, aims to make Umberto Eco's intellectual legacy visible, inviting participants to shape the conference with the ambition of developing a scientific event that is genuinely close to Umberto Eco's way of thinking.