Introduction

Italian literature abounds in the most disparate formal literary works that focus on the Asian continent, from the near Middle East to the stratovolcanic archipelago of Japan and crossing the whole Arabian Peninsula and Southeast Asia. Asia has always been a source of interest, wonder, attraction, and discovery for Italian travelers who extensively reported from or wrote about it. In the twentieth century, an age characterized by overwhelming globalization, speediness, and the frenetic development of tourism, some leitmotivs emerged from travel accounts: on the one hand, progressive westernization, the dilution of traditions, and the struggle to preserve local cultures, on the other hand, the fear of homologation and standardization and a sense of disenchantment.

In 1998, expert war correspondent, curious and meticulous observer and avid traveler Tiziano Terzani (1938–2004), who was popular for his extensive knowledge of twentieth-century East Asia, decided to collect the accounts of his travels and his first-hand experience across Asia in a single volume entitled In Asia. The author left a historical, geographical, political, social and cultural testimony that ultimately contributed to shaping the public’s reception and understanding of this wide geographical range: Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, Burma, North Korea and South Korea, Tibet, Nepal, Pakistan, Siberia, Philippines, Thailand, Sri Lanka, India, the last country where he lived, China, and Japan. The complexity of the collection lies in its miscellaneous nature: its topics range from history and culture to politics and economics, from large-scale to small-scale events, from ordinary to extraordinary people and merge in intensively informative pages of highly intellectual depth.