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Umberto Eco (1932-2016) was a world-renowned Italian media theorist and bestselling novelist who loved to explore and interpret how cultures make sense of themselves through language and symbols. From the study of James Bond to Superman to James Joyce and Thomas Aquinas, from the Monasteries in the Middle Ages to California's Hearst Castle, Eco was a cultural detective. He studied how we make meaning in popular culture as well as high art. In the academic world his name is most famously associated with the field of "'semiotics," sometimes known as the science of signs and wonderfully defined by Eco as "the discipline studying everything which can be used in order to lie.” Eco’s work has become important to everyone who wonders about how we make things mean,  from politicians, to social activists to advertisers. Through Eco's academic and popular writing this course provides an introduction to semiotics---the study of signs--- and the work of cultural interpretation focusing on popular as well as high Italian culture. Students, following Eco's lead, will engage in the work of interpreting high art, advertisements, public spaces, local rituals---formal and informal, and more in the quest to “read” the signs of Italy.