After receiving a Ph.D. from the University of Turin (1954), Eco worked as a cultural editor for Italian Radio-Television and also lectured at the University of Turin (1956–64). He then taught in Florence and Milan and finally, in 1971, assumed a professorial post at the University of Bologna. His initial studies and researches were in aesthetics, his principal work in this area being Opera aperta (1962; rev. ed. 1972, 1976; The Open Work), which suggests that in much modern music, Symbolist verse, and literature of controlled disorder (Franz Kafka (Kafka, Franz), James Joyce (Joyce, James)) the messages are fundamentally ambiguous and invite the audience to participate more actively in the interpretive and creative process. From this work he went on to explore other areas of communication and semiotics in such volumes as A Theory of Semiotics (1976) and Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (1984), both written in English. Many of his prolific writings in criticism, history, and communication have been translated into various foreign languages, including La ricerca della lingua perfetta nella cultura europea (1993; The Search for the Perfect Language) and Kant e l'ornitorinco (1997; Kant and the Platypus). He edited the companion volumes Storia della bellezza (2004; History of Beauty) and Storia della bruttezza (2007; On Ugliness).

The Name of the Rose—in story, a murder mystery set in a 14th-century Italian monastery but, in essence, a questioning of “truth” from theological, philosophical, scholarly, and historical perspectives—became an international best-seller. A film version, directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud, appeared in 1986. Eco continued to explore the connections between fantasy and reality in another best-selling novel, Il pendolo di Foucault (1988; Foucault's Pendulum). His subsequent fictional works include L'isola del giorno prima (1995; The Island of the Day Before) and La misteriosa fiamma della regina Loana (2004; The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana).