Do we like them?

Do we like Umberto Eco?

Our score: 8 out of 10. A long record on the right side of fascism and censorship, with one contested stance on a boycott and gaps we couldn't fill.

Eco was the Italian professor who became a global name. He was a semiotician, someone who studies how signs and symbols carry meaning. His first novel, The Name of the Rose, turned him from academic to international celebrity, and the 1986 film with Sean Connery added to that. He died in February 2016, aged 84.

The thing he's best remembered for outside the novels is his 1995 essay on Ur-Fascism, which lists common features of fascism and warns it can come back in respectable clothes. He wrote it from his own experience of growing up under Mussolini. That is why it keeps getting dragged into Italian politics, including this August, when an Il Foglio piece defended it after a minister dismissed it.

The contested bits are small. In 2011 he told an Israeli book fair that boycotting scholars over their governments' policies was wrong, as AP reported. Whether that reads as defending open exchange or as brushing off a boycott depends on where you stand on the issue. In 2015 he also drew a pile-on for saying social media gave a platform to “legioni di imbecilli”. That's a grumpy professor's one-liner rather than anything harmful.

We found no court case against him, and nothing in the reporting we could find suggested he mistreated anyone. The file is mostly Italian-language and we couldn't open every article, so it's thinner than we'd like on how he treated people day to day. On what we've got, he's a safe one to love, and The Name of the Rose is still a ripper read.