The article identifies three properties of cultural icons: the recognizability, the ability to generate a community, the tendency of being "reworked". The latter recalls Eco's thought that, in order to become "iconic", a text must be "dismembered" and enjoyed one piece at a time. Later, Eco identified two new requirements: a completely furnished world and the abundance of intertextual archetypes. Our aim is to clarify the nature of these archetypes and the distinctive features of the world represented by the iconic texts. Lastly, we examine the Model Reader of these texts, which seem to invite the readers to play with them,