Guido Ferraro

Guido Ferraro is an Italian semiotician who teaches General Semiotics and Narrative Theory at the University of Turin. Semiotics is the discipline that studies how signs (words, images, objects, interfaces) produce meaning, and Ferraro has applied it to myth, cinema, advertising, lifestyles and new media.

His career can be traced through a few stages:

• his training in the school of Silvio D'Arco Avalle, philologist and semiotician, from whom he takes the structuralist method;
• the 1990s, when in Turin he set up the first research laboratories on hypertext (a text made of linked blocks that the reader moves through by choosing the links), on multimedia and on corporate communication on the World Wide Web;
• the direction of the Interdepartmental Centre for Research on Communication (CIRCe) at the University of Turin, merged in 2026 into the SERTO centre, Semiotic Research in Torino;
• the presidency of the Italian Association for Semiotic Studies (AISS), the scholarly society that brings together Italian researchers in the discipline;
• the proposal of a «neoclassical semiotics», which brings the tools of the discipline together in a single framework, set out in Fondamenti di teoria sociosemiotica (Aracne, 2012) and in Teorie della narrazione (Carocci).

In 2019 the Department of Philosophy and Education Sciences of the University of Turin dedicated the volume Semiotica 3.0 to him.

Source: Carocci editore, scheda autore Guido Ferraro, e profilo accademico dell'Università di Torino, consultati il 21/10/2026; Wikidata Q132851842 per l'anno di nascita; SERTO - Semiotic Research in Torino, Semiotica 3.0. In onore di Guido Ferraro, 22/10/2019.

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