Umberto Eco

#1 Italian bestseller “Witty and wry . . . It’s hard not to be charmed.” — New York Times Book Review “One of the most influential thinkers of our time.” — Los Angeles Times1945, Lake Como. Mussolini and his mistress are captured and shot by local partisans. The precise circumstances of Il Duce’s death remain …

In the mold of his acclaimed History of Beauty, renowned cultural critic Umberto Eco’s On Ugliness is an exploration of the monstrous and the repellant in visual culture and the arts. What is the voyeuristic impulse behind our attraction to the gruesome and the horrible? Where does the magnetic appeal of the sordid …