Eco, Umberto (1932-2016).

Il problema estetico in San Tommaso. Turin, Edizioni di Filosofia, 1956.

4° (250x176 mm). 157, [3] pages. Original publisher’s wrappers. A good, uncut copy, leaves uniformly browned, minor tears to the upper margin of the title-page, loss to the outer corners of the upper cover.

Provenance: given by the author to the intellectual Folco Portinari (1926- 2019); see Eco’s autograph dedication on the title-page: “E’ speranza da bambini /l’auspicar che lasci un solco/ questo libro nel buon Folco/ mentre scrive del Parini”, dated Milan, 1957.

First edition of the first book by the famous Italian semiotician and novelist Umberto Eco.
Il problema estetico in San Tommaso consists of an enlargement of Eco’s thesis developed with the historian and philosopher Luigi Pareyson (1918-1981) on the theme of the rich, complex, and original aesthetic theories advanced by the influential medieval thinker Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274).

The volume was gifted by the author to the writer and literary historian Folco Portinari, well known for writing the extraordinary Slow Food Manifesto, a groundbreaking text that revolutionized food culture around the world. University professor and scholar of nineteenth- century Italian literature, he was also a pioneer of television when, in the 1950s, he joined the RAI – the national public broadcasting company of Italy – together with Umberto Eco and a group of intellectuals nicknamed the ‘corsari’ (i.e., corsairs) because of their distance from dominant politics.

The author’s dedication suggests that at the time of the gift Folco Portinari was writing Parini e la poetica dell’oggetto, his essay on the central value, in Giuseppe Parini’s prose, of the concept of objecthood and its semantic extension which would appear in the periodical Paragone in December 1958.

L. Gambetti – F. Vezzosi, La letteratura italiana del Novecento. Repertorio delle prime edizioni, Genoa, 1997, p. 188; F. Franco. “Rassegna di studi pariniani recenti”, Italica, 37 (1960), p. 270.