Eco LibraryUmberto Eco's Milan flat, about 33,000 books
Room
Mode
Colour
Link
Umberto Eco's library
Click any book for its card. The top bar works while this card is up.
Drag to orbit · scroll to zoom · arrow keys move you through the rooms (← → turn) · click a book
Notable books
Titles Eco wrote about or used in his novels, marked with a gold band on the shelves.
Tours
Each stop flies to a book and opens its card; in Walk mode you stand in front of it instead. Where Eco wrote or spoke about the book, the card quotes him and names the source. Next and Back step through the stops, Esc leaves.
About this map
This is Umberto Eco's library as it stood in his flat on Piazza Castello, Milan: about 33,000 books in a ring of rooms, white shelving to the ceiling along the corridors, a big study with island bookcases, and a room of rare books in glazed cabinets. The map draws every shelf, names the books that two library catalogues and the films of the flat let it name, and leaves the rest grey. Where Eco wrote or spoke about a book, the tours quote him and say where.
The rare books, about 1,300 volumes, went to the Biblioteca Nazionale Braidense in 2021. The working library, more than 32,000 volumes, went to the University of Bologna, was reshelved in his order in Palazzo Poggi and opened there as the Biblioteca Eco on 1 July 2026. The sources are listed below; so is how the map was made and what its colours mean.
How the map was made
Nothing here was measured. The rooms and their bookcases follow the Fondazione Umberto Eco's photographic survey of the shelving (bookcases lettered A-S, each with a subject caption) and published visitor accounts; room sizes, the position of the units and the island units in the study are estimates. Every shelf slot is drawn, and each book carries an origin:
video — its spine was read in a frame of one of the films listed below, with a link to that second of the video;
photo — read from a published photograph, with a link to it;
catalog — a record of the Braidense catalogue (the rare books: Braidense's catalogue documents the transferred collection and its ordering; its additional ECO.04 section brings together publications by Eco for research and does not by itself establish a copy's original position in the Milan apartment, so those records are listed as reference entries on a table in the study rather than shelved) or of the University of Bologna catalogue (the working library, which has no Milan shelfmark, so the record is placed by subject on the bookcase whose caption fits);
unlabelled — a slot the shelving must have held, drawn as a grey spine, book unknown.
A placement says how sure the position is: catalogued, seen, inferred, reference or filler, and a certainty tier (certain, guess, unknown) sums it up.
Footage, photographs and catalogues
Reading the colours
Spines are coloured by language; rare books in aged leather and vellum tones; unidentified books in grey.
What Eco said about his library
Umberto Eco's LibraryPiazza Castello 13, Milan · a 3D map