Umberto Eco, author of The Name of the Rose, dies aged 84

Italian novelist and intellectual Umberto Eco has died, aged 84.

His family announced he had passed away at home late Friday but gave no further details, BBC reported. He had been suffering from cancer.

The unorthodox detective story, which was set in a medieval monastery, was turned into a film starring Sean Connery. “I write novels only on the weekends”.

He received a degree in philosophy from the University of Turin in 1954 and later became a professor at the University of Bologna, while also working as a journalist.

Italian author Elisabetta Scarbi, who founded a publishing house previous year with Eco and other Italian writers, called him “a great living encyclopedia” who taught young people “the capacity to love discoveries and marvels”.

“I was a perfectionist and wanted to make them look as though they had been printed, so I wrote them in capital letters and made up title pages, summaries, illustrations”, he told The Paris Review in 1988. “I cannot spend the rest of my life talking about [this] book”, he says one day.

Eco was the recipient of the Premio Strega, Italy’s most prestigious literary award, was named a Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur by the French government, and is an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, according to his publisher.

Eco’s most famous work, “The Name Of The Rose”, was first translated from its original Italian title, “Il Nome Della Rosa” in 1983 by translator, William Weaver.

“Eco has created a rich opportunity to thoroughly satirise the newspaper business and lampoon sensationalist journalism”, The Age’s reviewer Michaela McGuire wrote.

He leaves a wife, Renate Ramge Eco, a German art teacher whom he married in 1962 and with whom he had a son and a daughter.