“When we consider a book, we mustn’t ask ourselves what it says but what it means” (from The Name of the Rose). It is this very quest to unravel the literal, to decipher the “signs” of communication and culture, which runs through Umberto Eco’s prolific career as a writer of fiction and philosophy, and as one of the foremost European intellectuals of the age. Whether he was decoding quibbles of medieval theology, Joyce’s Ulysses, or such disparate phenomena of mass culture as Charlie Brown and Italian TV personality cults, Umberto Eco’s clinical eye will not fail to continue striking readers with its unflinching rigour after his death at the age of 84 last week.

Umberto Eco is perhaps best known abroad for his debut novel, The Name of the Rose (1980). Translated into 40 languages and having sold more than 10 million copies, this is a thrilling murder mystery set in a 14th-century monastery, where for seven (symbolic) days we follow the steps of friar William of Baskerville (the Conan Doyle allusions are never far below the surface), as he moves against the dramatic Alpine peaks with the confidence of a proto-Sherlock Holmes.

At the risk of spoiling the mystery of the title, the concept of “the name of the rose” well illustrates one of the central concerns of Eco’s entire body of work: based on the verse of Bernard of Cluny’s De Contemptu Mundi “Stat rosa pristina nomine, nomina nuda tenemus” (“Yesterday’s rose remains only in name, we hold only naked names”), it is a useful cipher for understanding the lesser-known branch of critical theory that is semiotics, to which Eco dedicated the greater and self-reportedly more “serious” part of his intellectual endeavours. Essentially concerned with the study of sign dynamics and meaning, semiotic theory tacitly shapes the thinking of many major philosophers in the assumptions they make about the symbolic valence of language.

As Professor of Semiotics at the University of Bologna, some of his seminal works of philosophy include The Open Work (1962) and The Role of the Reader (1979) which, following Roland Barthes, define the “open text” as one that inherently allows for multiple interpretations, and the delightful Six Walks in the Fictional Woods (1994), a collection of “wanderings” through Agatha Christie all the way to Little Red Riding Hood, about different types of reading experiences.

Alongside his active academic and journalistic career, Eco continued to write novels at once intensely scholarly and wildly popular. Foucault’s Pendulum (1988) sketches a growing obsession with a conspiracy theory of the protagonists’ own invention, involving a Knight Templar sect planning to take over the world. Baudolino (2000), another historical novel, is a picaresque narrative of the life of a consummate liar, and a veritable encyclopaedia of the Middle Ages. More recently, Eco displayed an interest in modern history through The Prague Cemetery (2010), centred on the fabrication of the anti-Semitic pamphlet The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The novel that would sadly be his last is Number Zero, published in 2015, a satirical look at Mussolini’s legacy and at the infamous bribery scandals of the Italian 1990s.

Umberto Eco has sometimes been criticised for writing in an overly journalistic or ostentatious style, as well as for the hype surrounding his fiction and public persona in Italy. I will certainly remember him as the venerated intellectual whose articles about the value of studying the classics our teachers used to declaim quasi-religiously in class. But, above all, Eco deserves to be remembered for what he has taught and still has to teach us about our relation to the world of symbols we inhabit. As we weave our way through our own universe of verbal and visual signs, Umberto Eco shows us that the boundary between the symbolic and the literal is often unstable, and the apparently literal and self-explanatory are often the most esoteric and arcane “signs” of them all.