Tiziano Terzani, on the trail of a protagonist of our time

Too often Tiziano Terzani is "reduced" to what he did and wrote in the last period of his life. The image that emerges is that of the author of Letters Against War , the man who for months went around dressed like an Indian holy man, with his long white beard, supporting the reasons for peace against the spiral of war triggered by the attacks of September 11, 2001. It was certainly the most media and popular phase of the famous journalist who passed away in July twenty years ago, but only a phase .

Tiziano Terzani was much more than the image handed down from his last years of life . He was an author with a rich and very lively imagination , fueled by an entire life spent traveling around the world encountering news and telling it before it became history or, worse, fell into oblivion. An imaginary, that of Terzani, absolutely to be preserved in this world devoured by haste, asleep and crushed by the economy, by parochial and selfish visions. Protecting, or rather re-greening is what Tamara Baris wants to do in the volume In Oriente with Tiziano Terzani (Giulio Perrone Editore, 2024, pp. 216) following a path of personal encounter with the journalist, a path that naturally leads to Terzani's stories dedicated to 'Asia, but it is not intended to be a banal rereading of reports, articles on Japan, China, Vietnam. For Baris, following the journalist's trail means recomposing the pieces of a puzzle, designing a real way of being . It is the continuous construction of an "I", perpetually in movement, aimed towards the other and his reasons. Terzani sewed Asia on himself, took it with him to his home, searching for it among the objects of distant markets and merchants. Armed with his Leica, he felt journalism as a mission, as the sacred and inalienable search for the truth, for what he sought and saw, for the details that make the world.

That mission «that was most congenial to him, that of correspondent from the forgotten and often most dangerous places of Asia. The volume thus transports us to a distant and little-known world, the one east of the Indus, the world of Hindu temples and Buddhist pagodas, of great rivers and streams of crowded human masses. The Asia of ideologies, failed revolutions, wars and the bloodiest dictatorships. A world for which Terzani began to travel far and wide in 1971, when he left a secure job in Italy to move arms, luggage and family to Singapore to become a correspondent for the German weekly Der Spiegel. Always beside him, his wife Angela - "the pole to which the elephant is tied with a silk thread" Terzani liked to say - and his children Folco and Saskia: his great love and family, the only fixed points of a life lived "looking at the flowers from a running horse".

However, the only companions he allowed himself during his journey as a journalist were some books by people who had followed the same itineraries before him . They were his guides, the best, because he could decide at any moment whether to use them or not . His articles, now collected in several volumes, can have the same value and the same function, guides for traveling with the body, but also simply with the mind. It is a task that Tamara Baris's book also tries to carry out, with humility and participation, which manages to convey to us Terzani's passion in telling and describing places, people, meetings, emotions, landscapes. Baris manages to recall the curiosity that constantly pushed him to dig, in search of the "whys" that go beyond simplistic explanations. Terzani was not and did not want to be super partes at all costs, much less please everyone: «I do not pretend to be objective at all: I myself have my prejudices, principles, sympathies and emotions which certainly influenced the choice of the same things I saw and recorded ", he loved to repeat. However, he did not allow the things he believed in and his sympathies to cloud the journalist's inquiring gaze. Perhaps precisely because of this ability to read what was around him and treasure it internally, Terzani remains, even twenty years after his death, the image of a man sincere with himself and with others , a man aware of his limits and those of his profession, but not for this reason resigned to general opinion.

A man who was proud to write: «I cannot have written the whole truth, because if there was a certain one I would not have seen it in its entirety. However, I did everything I could to ensure that what I wrote was true, because I am convinced that, even if there is not just one truth, there is certainly something false."