Umberto Eco, author of 'The Name of the Rose,' dead at 84

The Italian author and academic who became one of Italy's best-known cultural exports and keenest cultural critics, died at home in Milan on Friday evening after a battle with cancer, according to a family member who asked not to be identified.

French President Francois Hollande remembered Eco as "an immense humanist," adding that "libraries have lost an insatiable reader, universities a dazzling professor and literature a passionate writer."

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

Author of books ranging from novels to scholarly tomes to essay collections, Eco was fascinated with the obscure and the mundane, and his books were both engaging narratives and philosophical and intellectual exercises.

The bearded, heavy-set scholar, critic and novelist took on the esoteric theory of semiotics, the study of signs and symbols in language; popular culture icons like James Bond; and the technical languages of the Internet.

Eco told the newspaper that the official publishing numbers may have been off by a large margin, explaining that when "The Name of the Rose" was published there were no deals with publishing houses in Eastern Europe and Asia, which published their own translations without obtaining rights or paying royalties.

In 2000, when awarding Eco Spain's prestigious Prince of Asturias Prize for communications, the jury praised his works "of universal distribution and profound effect that are already classics in contemporary thought."

Eco, whose family name is supposedly a Latin acronym of ex caelis oblatus, or gift from heaven, given to his foundling grandfather by a city official, said the insular culture there was a source for his "world vision: a skepticism and an aversion to rhetoric."

Recent works include "From the Tree to