```Firstly a semiotic author``? ==  Since Umberto Eco is considered firstly a semiotic author, one can argue that he must be read in his own language (as opposed to English) to truly grasp the ``signs`` he wants the reader to grasp and then to consider the relationships between them. This is pure opinion, and not even a very well informed one, let alone well-written.  Eco is a perfectly capable fiction writer as well as a semiotician, and had he somehow intended regardless to somehow encode messages into the text, he would certainly be capable of doing so with more than the mere syntax of Italian.  Next time I stumble across this article, I'm deleting this item of ``trivia`` (that's the section it's under) unless someone else beats me to it.      == `