The revered literary critic, author and essayist – most famous for 1980 novel The Name of the Rose – had been suffering from cancer

The celebrated Italian intellectual Umberto Eco, who shot to fame with his 1980 novel The Name of the Rose, has been remembered as a master of Italian culture after his death at the age of 84.

Eco died on Friday night after suffering from cancer, prompting tributes to pour in for the esteemed writer.

He was “an extraordinary example of a European intellectual, combining unique intelligence of the past with a limitless capacity to anticipate the future”, said Italy’s prime minister, Matteo Renzi. “It’s an enormous loss for culture, which will miss his writing and voice, his sharp and lively thought, and his humanity,” Renzi told the Ansa news agency.

Italy’s culture minister, Dario Franceschini, said Eco remained youthful until his last day. “A master who brought Italian culture to the whole world,” Franceschini wrote on Twitter.

Leading daily Corriere della Sera called Eco “the writer who changed Italian culture”, while newspaper La Stampa described a country in mourning for the author’s death.

Through Eco’s academic writings and his bestselling books, he became a respected intellectual voice both in Italy and abroad.

Internationally, he remains best known for his bestseller The Name of the Rose, a medieval detective novel set in an Italian abbey, which follows Brother William of Baskerville as he investigates a series of suspicious deaths. The novel captured imaginations globally and was turned into a film starring Sean Connery as William.

The work secured Eco’s international reputation and he went on to pen a number of other novels, including Foucault’s Pendulum in 1988. His most recent work, Numero Zero, was published last year and centres on a new newspaper in Milan funded by a meddling tycoon. Later this year a final novel will be released posthumously, Italian media reported.

Although Eco’s works sold millions of copies, he was not one to pander to popular tastes. “It’s only publishers and some journalists who believe that people want simple things. People are tired of simple things. They want to be challenged,” he told the Guardian in 2011.

While his first novel was not published until 1980, Eco said he had always had a “narrative impulse” and began writing stories at the age of 10 or 12. Born on 5 January 1932 in Alessandria, north-west Italy, Eco rejected his father’s wish that he study law and instead read philosophy and literature at the University of Turin.

After finished his doctoral thesis, Eco lectured at his alma mater and during the same period worked at Italy’s state broadcaster, RAI, as a cultural editor. He went on to develop his interest in semiotics, the study of signs and symbols, and became a professor of the subject at the University of Bologna. His significant academic writings include On Beauty and the later On Ugliness, exploring how people’s perceptions are shaped through history.

George Lakoff, a professor of cognitive linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, credited his friend with changing academia’s approach to literature by giving respectability to the study of popular art forms.

“He showed how not only to understand culture, in general, but to create new culture that way. That is what this man was about,” Lakoff told the BBC World Service. “Not only that, he loved it, he enjoyed every minute of it. To be with Eco was to just enjoy life.”