The novelist and intellectual Umberto Eco has died aged 84. Eco was best known for his 1980 work The Name of the Rose, was one of the world’s most revered literary names. The author had been suffering from cancer. The Name of the Rose was Eco’s first novel but he had been publishing works for more than 20 years beforehand.

Eco was born in Alessandria, in the northern Italian region of Piedmont and went to a Salesian school. He developed an interest in medieval philosophy and literature and studied the subjects at the University of Turin in the 1950s. It was around that time that the he turned his back on the Catholic church.

He went on to work for the Italian broadcaster Rai and began to lecture at his alma mater. Eco’s first book – an extension of his doctoral thesis – was published in 1956. Six years later, he married the academic Renate Ramge.

Eco, who continued his academic work late in life, wrote several other major novels including “The Island of the Day Before” (1994), “Baudolino” (2000) and “The Prague Cemetery” (2010). Among his dozens of essays on semiotics, medieval aesthetics, linguistics and philosophy, two in particular gained enduring popularity with their analysis of cultural standards. They are “History of Beauty” (2004), and “On Ugliness” (2007).