Eco, Dante e la semiosi ermetica

This paper focuses on Dante’s centrality in the Umberto Eco’s reflection about persistence over the centuries of the “way of thinking” defined “hermetic semiosis” by the author of The name of the rose, which has affected at considerable lenght many contemporary “reader-oriented” theories and practices. In fact Dante, by contravening the Thomist devaluation of the poetic genre, not only assigned a revealing and mystic-prophetical function to poetry, but also, at the same time, according to Eco, anticipated the “epistemological break” begun with florentine neoplatonism, namely “that mystic text trend which is still continuing today” (Eco 1985).