226 - Eco (Umberto) Il Problema Estetico in San Tommaso, first edition, initialled presentation inscription from the author to Folco Portinari “E’ speranza da bambini l’auspicar che lasci un solco questo libro nel buon Folco mentre scrive del Parini - U -” to half-title, dated Milan '57, half-title with some marginal repairs, affecting couple letters of date of inscription, some other small and skillful marginal repairs, including to title, margins browned, upper hinge strengthened, original printed wrappers, some small chips and short tears to extremities, spine with central vertical split but holding, spine and wrapper extremities browned, 4to, Turin, Edizioni di Filosofia, 1956.

Eco (Umberto) Il Problema Estetico in San Tommaso, first edition, initialled presentation inscription from the author to Folco Portinari “E’ speranza da bambini l’auspicar che lasci un solco questo libro nel buon Folco mentre scrive del Parini - U -” to half-title, dated Milan '57, half-title with some marginal repairs, affecting couple letters of date of inscription, some other small and skillful marginal repairs, including to title, margins browned, upper hinge strengthened, original printed wrappers, some small chips and short tears to extremities, spine with central vertical split but holding, spine and wrapper extremities browned, 4to, Turin, Edizioni di Filosofia, 1956. *** The first book by the famous Italian semiotician and novelist Umberto Eco, an enlargement of his university thesis on the aesthetic theories of Saint Thomas Aquinas. This copy is presented to the writer and literary historian Folco Portinari, who worked alongside Eco in the 1950s as part of the so-called “corsari”, a group of young intellectuals recruited to modernise the state broadcasting station Radiotelevisione Italiana (RAI). The inscription suggests that Portinari was at the time writing Parini e la poetica dell’oggetto, an essay on the concept of objecthood in Giuseppe Parini’s prose that was published in the periodical Paragone in December 1958.