Many a university professor daydreams about someday casting aside his footnotes and writing a splashy novel that will sell zillions of copies and make him rich. Umberto Eco, 57, a bearded and bespectacled professor of semiotics at the University of Bologna, fulfilled exactly that daydream eight years ago, when he concocted his mega-macro-medieval-mystery hit The Name of the Rose. He wrote part of the best seller in a 50-room country retreat near Urbino that he bought and restored himself and where he spends his leisure hours expanding his 40,000-volume collection of antique books and playing the recorder in his bathroom (because...
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