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Umberto Eco looks like a genial mentor, white-bearded and approachable, his comfortable rotundity settled deep in the softest armchair of his Milan living room. Yet the 73-year-old academic and author, condemned to international celebrity by his 1980 debut novel The Name of the Rose, is not without thorns. Today's discourse — ranging from his newest work of fiction, The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, to politics, religion and neckties — bristles with sharp observations. Avuncular he may seem, but this famous European intellectual has not mellowed with age.

Age, memory and nostalgia are, however, the central themes of Queen Loana, Eco's fifth novel, just published in English translation. Struck by amnesia, the narrator, an antiquarian book dealer, begins to dig through the paper trail of his early life in an attempt to kick-start his memory. The novel itself is illustrated with images from comics and children's books that may or may not be clues to the narrator's sequestered identity.

For Eco, of course, everything is a potential clue or sign. A professor at the University of Bologna, he continues to develop the field of semiotics, which he helped create in the 1960s and 1970s by studying the ways that people convey information. "Humans communicate with language but also with everything else we do. The books you own, the way you decorate your house, whether you wear a tie or not are all signs of something else," he explains. "That's semiotics in a nutshell."

His earlier novels neatly adapt this philosophy to the thriller format — Rose, for example, is a medieval whodunit set in a monastery, Foucault's Pendulum a conspiracy of sects and secret societies. The new storyline plunges the author into a forensic examination of nostalgia. "By definition, the word nostalgia is the desire to return, to return to childhood or your 20s or 30s," says Eco, adding, "I'm fine where I am. My relationship with the past is one of tenderness and continuous discovery." One beat and he leans back with a laugh, having decided to confess: "O.K.," he says. "I have always been nostalgic for my childhood — it started when I was 14."

Because of this, Queen Loana is strikingly more personal than his earlier work. "I created a character who was different enough from me that I could give the book loads of my own memories and feel like my privacy was still protected. Everyone at 16, for example, has someone they fall in love with, but never tell." Eco pauses, gives a melancholy smile: "Well, in this case, the girl in the book was really mine."

Eco's popular success as a writer derives from his ability to convey complex ideas simply and to let those ideas and his learned — sometimes arcane — references support his plots, rather than weigh them down. Foucault's Pendulum, published in 1988, tells the story of three men in modern Italy whose intellectual games about the Knights Templar catapult them into danger. Along with The Name of the Rose, it helped to spawn an industry of history-infused thrillers — most recently, Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code. Eco is not convinced by Brown's formula: "The whole conspiracy of that plot ... is contained in Foucault's Pendulum. It's all old material that's been covered a thousand times before. Brown was very good at taking trash lying around and turning it into a page turner. But it makes me laugh that people take it seriously."

Still, Eco treats lowbrow cultural phenomena with the same seriousness as higher-flown accomplishments. In one essay, for example, he analyzes the essence of Italian society by observing Mike Bongiorno, a TV game show host; another dissects the design of the 1,000-lire note. He has also described how comic-book hero Flash Gordon imparted American ideals to children growing up in Mussolini's Italy. Everything is grist for his mill. Eco's catholic approach is reflected by the way in which contemporary paintings on the walls of his spacious apartment are interspersed with drawings by his grandson, and the alacrity with which he leaps up to show off his antique-book collection. Unlocking the glass case he pulls out a copy of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, a richly illustrated 1499 volume, most often ascribed to a monk, Francesco Colonna, whom Eco describes as "the Joyce of his time."

If James Joyce was a latter-day Colonna, Eco is the modern incarnation of Plutarch, the Ancient Greek essayist, public thinker and iconoclast. Eco writes regular columns for the Italian weekly L'Espresso and for the daily newspaper La Repubblica, tackling themes such as the mass media and the history of philosophy — sometimes turning his fire on George W. Bush and his country's own premier, Silvio Berlusconi, both of whom he scorns for conservative policy and arrogant leadership. His long sojourns in the U.S., including teaching stints at Harvard and Yale, have helped form his perspective. "I feel profoundly European, but in some ways I can feel even more comfortable in the U.S. — of course more in New York than in Houston," Eco remarks, just days before leaving for a U.S. book tour. "I can't relate in any way to Bush's fundamentalism. But I can take some comfort that he represents only half of America."

Reminded of Donald Rumsfeld's dismissal of "Old Europe" as a spent force, Eco suggests that the New World still has much to learn: "Sure, Europe is old. But age brings advantages, like experience. Unfortunately with our Continent's tragic history we've lived through centuries of massacres, and maybe our nerves are steadier for it. Not to be flip, but 3,000 died in the Twin Towers, and 6 million in the Holocaust. Europe's old age is one of wisdom, not of Alzheimer's."

His new book touches on politics, but also on faith. Raised Catholic, Eco has long since left the church. "Even though I'm still in love with that world, I stopped believing in God in my 20s after my doctoral studies on St. Thomas Aquinas. You could say he miraculously cured me of my faith," he says. He takes issue with other leading liberals' use of the word "fundamentalist" to describe Pope Benedict XVI's views. "Fundamentalism is a phenomenon that exists in Protestantism and Islam, among those who take the sacred texts literally," muses Eco. "Catholicism never experienced that because there was always the Church as a mediator to explain the texts." He adds that it is too early to judge Benedict's intentions: "They say the office changes the man."

The convulsion of public mourning that greeted the death of Benedict's predecessor, Pope John Paul II, interests Eco. He assumes that many who pressed into St. Peter's Square didn't even believe in God. "That means it needs more than a religious explanation," he says. "It was more like a mythological gathering. It's a sign that people today have a need for a King. John Paul was a classic figure of royalty, of a paternal transcendence." Perhaps Eco's own continuing appeal may signal another popular longing: for friendly mentors, to enrich and unravel the world for its bewildered inhabitants.

• JEFF ISRAELY / Milan
• Italy's Umberto Eco muses upon God, old Europe and his new novel