Thirty years of Asian travels on the great traces of history, but above all on the deepest and most intimate traces of self-discovery. On the one hand, harsh and incisive articles for Italian newspapers such as Corriere della Sera, and international ones such as Der Spiegel; on the other, travel diaries written by a constantly restless soul.
Tiziano Terzani (Florence, 1938–2004) was one of the most prominent journalists and travelers of twentieth-century Italy. Although he spent more than half of his life in Asia – together with his wife Angela Staude – he continually had to come to terms with what he once called his “sticky” Florentine identity. This persistent echo of origin was profoundly shaken during his most unexpected journey, the one recounted in A Fortune-Teller Told Me.
Everything started from an unsettling prophecy. In 1976, a Hong Kong fortune-teller foresaw in his abacus the risk of Terzani dying in a plane crash. Terzani’s belief in this possibility became the starting point of a “wingless” journey throughout 1993, undertaken without boarding a single airplane. The twenty-seven chapters of A Fortune-Teller Told Me recount this journey. Yet the experience was not recorded in writing alone. Alongside notebooks and drafts, Terzani produced photographs, negatives and contact sheets that remained unpublished for decades.
It was to the rediscovery of these photographs that I devoted my Master’s thesis in Modern Literature at the University of Milan. What began as an archival inquiry soon revealed the need to rethink the book beyond the limits of the printed page: if Terzani was both writer and photographer, can A Fortune-Teller Told Me still be understood as a purely textual work? Or does the archive reveal that its original project exceeded the printed form?
Venice – Where it all started
The project began with a simple question: after forty years as a correspondent in Asia, had Tiziano Terzani never taken photographs? A quick search led to the Fondazione Giorgio Cini in Venice, where Terzani’s archive is preserved. The archive, transferred from his Florentine home to the island of San Giorgio in 2014, is still partly under cataloguing.
Why Venice, one might wonder, given that Terzani was proudly Florentine? As Angela Terzani Staude remarked at the time of the archive’s donation, Venice has long been a historical threshold between West and East – the departure point of merchants, Jesuits and adventurers who ventured toward Asia. In this sense, the archive found an unexpectedly coherent home.
Walking through cloisters and corridors, the materiality of a life in transit becomes visible: articles, travel books and notebooks, maps marked with routes and connections. But above all photographs waiting to be seen.
Florence – The choice of A Fortune-Teller Told Me and the help of Angela Terzani
Abundance quickly became the central challenge. Too many photographs, negatives and contact sheets. Which thread to follow? I returned to a thesis I had written two years earlier, on the evolution of A Fortune-Teller Told Me, from diaries to book. The journey of 1993 offered a precise frame.
A further issue soon became evident: how to make this material visible without weakening its historical and literary force? The answer pointed toward the digital sphere, and particularly the web. From there, further questions followed: how to rewrite a printed text in multimedia form? And how to transform a linear narrative into a digital storytelling environment (Alexander, 2011)?
The objective became the creation of a “digital illustrated reportage” combining the text with the unpublished photographs taken during that year. Everything unrelated to the 1993 itinerary was set aside. Only images corresponding to places and encounters narrated in the book were selected. Identification, however, was not straightforward. How to match a face to a name? How to recognize a place from a temple in the background or a dusty road?
After a few emails and phone calls, I went to Florence to meet Angela Staude, Terzani’s wife and lifelong companion. She welcomed me with Chinese tea on a foggy February day. I spent an entire afternoon identifying places and people in black and white, but above all listening to the memories of that world that no longer exists.
Warwick – The idea of the map of the book and the creation of the website
Soon a second challenge emerged: how can a reader avoid getting lost among the many stops of this journey? How to grasp the space in which the narrative unfolds, so vast and intricate? At the Digital Humanities laboratory of the University of Warwick I began to explore the possibilities of digital mapping. In addition to maps embedded within each chapter, I created a global interactive map to trace Terzani’s itinerary while engaging with recent reflections on literary mapping in the digital age (Cooper et al., 2016). It sought to follow the pebbles Terzani had scattered between his pages.
Moving across the map made it possible to see the journey not as a sequence of episodes, but as a continuous spatial trajectory. Distances, returns, and crossings – barely perceptible in the linear structure of the book – became immediately visible. The fact that Terzani travelled without ever taking a plane made this continuity even more striking: what appears fragmented on the page revealed itself as a physically coherent path across Asia and Europe. In this sense, the digital storytelling did not add new information but made visible a dimension of the journey that remains largely inaccessible through reading alone.
When the final map appeared on the screen, something became visible that the printed page alone did not immediately reveal: the book contained both Asia and Europe together. If I had only read what was written, I would have missed this spatial dimension.
Conclusions
The shift from written text to digital storytelling did not simply move the book online; it changed how the text is read and experienced. By bringing together writing, photographs, and maps in a single navigable space, the project made visible connections that remain implicit on the printed page. What had appeared as a linear narrative revealed itself instead as a layered and visual experience. In this sense, the digital format did not just reproduce the book, but helped clarify a hypothesis that had already emerged from the archive: that A Fortune-Teller Told Me was never a purely textual work. (Berry, 2012).
A Fortune-Teller Told Me can be read not simply as a narrative contained within a book, but as a universe that asks to be mapped, visualized and reinterpreted. Through his writing and photography, Terzani combined the precision of the journalist with the sensibility of a seeker, bearing witness to a world in transition and to what could still be preserved amid rapid transformation.
What emerged was not a replacement of the book, but an “extra-book” experience extending the boundaries of the physical volume. In this sense, digital storytelling functioned not as a simplification of literature, but as a critical mode of reading.
An unexpected afterlife
This research contributed to the illustrated 2024 edition of A Fortune-Teller Told Me, published on the twentieth anniversary of Terzani’s death, and subsequently evolved into a travelling exhibition presented in Milan, Legnano, Udine, and Siena. What began in the archive moved to the web, from the web to the book, and from the book to the exhibition space. Whether other journeys await cannot be foretold. Then again, the most coherent way to find out would be to ask a fortune-teller.
The digital storytelling platform can be accessed at www.unindovinomidisse.com. The website is currently password-protected due to copyright restrictions; access is available upon request for academic purposes by contacting Nicole Pecoitz (nicole.pecoitz@students.unibe.ch)
Nicole Pecoitz is a PhD candidate in Italian Literature at the University of Bern. Her research explores the relationship between writing and photography in the works of Tiziano Terzani, with particular attention to visual representations of Asia and the intermedial dimensions of twentieth-century travel literature. She holds a degree in Modern Literature from the University of Milan and has conducted research at the University of Edinburgh and the University of Warwick.
Her work combines archival research, digital storytelling, and editorial curatorship. She has curated four exhibitions on Terzani’s photographic work and the illustrated 2024 edition of Un indovino mi disse (Longanesi). She is a member of the research group on travel literature of the Société Européenne de Littérature Comparée.
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0008-5236-6975
References:
Alexander, B. (2011). The new digital storytelling: Creating narratives with new media. Praeger.
Berry, D. M. (Ed.). (2012). Understanding digital humanities. Palgrave Macmillan.
Cometa, M., & Coglitore, R. (Eds.). (2016). Fototesti: Letteratura e cultura visuale. Quodlibet.
Cooper, D., Donaldson, C., & Murrieta-Flores, P. (Eds.). (2016). Literary mapping in the digital age. Routledge.
Terzani, T. (1997). A fortune-teller told me: Earthbound travels in the Far East. HarperCollins.
