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The writer and semiologist advocates a sexual revolution to make us all 'European'

Outside Umberto Eco's office window in Milan looms the intimidating mass of Sforzesco castle, a reminder, with its towers and blackbirds, of various continental wars. Here once stood the 14th-century Castrum Portae Jovis – the Porta di Giove fortress – which was destroyed by the short-lived Aurea Republic of 1447. Between these walls, Leonardo Da Vinci and Donato Bramante once laboured; these very buttresses were conquered by Napoleon. And just beyond the moat – an area now invaded by tourists who have come to visit Michelangelo's La Pietà Rondanini – Marshall Radetzky's Austrian troops bombed the rioting city in 1848.