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A Great Man from Macerata Who Went Far: Giuseppe Tucci,
the Marches Region and the East
by Enrica Garzilli
The scientist and explorer Giuseppe Tucci thus wrote
about his journeys to Asia and his passion for
travelling and experiencing “the far”: far from the
banality and superficiality of everyday and massified
relationships. And he really did go far, as he was the
greatest expert in oriental studies that Italy has ever
had and one of the best internationally recognised
experts on Tibet, he was one of the first scientists in
the world to explore the hitherto unexplored regions of
Tibet and Nepal, he was an anthropologist,
archaeologist, and he disseminated Asia culture, both
ancient and contemporary – and he was a journalist too.
Tucci, the only legendary Italian oriental expert in the
whole of Asia, gave the world a better understanding of
the greatest Asiatic religions, and his critical
editions and original translations of valuable texts in
Sanskrit and in Tibetan opened up southern Asia to
scholars. With his legendary scientific expeditions to
Tibet, Nepal, Ladhak and Bhutan he opened up these
countries to geographers and modern travellers.
His work of discovery, restoration and preservation of
rare manuscripts, which are today kept in Rome in the
Tucci Foundation of the Oriental Library of IsIAO, the
former IsMEO (Institute for the Middle and Far East),
safe from the inevitable dangers of the Asiatic climate,
worms and rats – as specified in the descriptions of the
microfilms that reproduce the manuscripts –, and from
the even graver threat of destruction by man, due to
both the Cultural Revolution when China annexed Tibet,
and the greed of merchants and ignorant neglect, and his
expeditions to the then almost inaccessible territories
in the Himalayas, gave those countries a final place in
history, and not only in the work of scholars. Moreover,
following in the footsteps of his mentor Formichi, he
updated the ways of studying oriental languages, with a
first-hand understanding of the culture expressed by
those languages, enriching the patrimony of knowledge of
the world.
Tucci was born in Macerata on the 5TH of June 1894. His
father Oscar and his mother Ermenegilda Firmani had
emigrated to the Marches from Puglia. Something much
stronger than birthright ties Tucci to the Marches.
Perhaps it was the proximity of his native town and land
to the sea, which has always brought different peoples,
altough very distant, together as much as it has
separated them; or perhaps, belonging to a region which
has produced so many travellers and explorers of the
East; whatever the reason, Tucci was immediately
acclaimed as an ‘infant prodigy’ towards the East and,
as he himself said, when he was only twelve he already
knew Sanskrit, Hebrew and Iranian.
Macerata was made famous by the Ricci family with Father
Matteo (1552 – 1610), a famous Jesuit missionary who
introduced the oldest Chinese civilization to Europe,
wrote important treatises on astronomy and geography,
and died in China. His tomb in Beijing was destroyed and
rebuilt at three different times in history ( the last
time was after the Cultural Revolution, some ten years
ago), and his name is among the few foreigners in the
National Chinese Encyclopaedia.
The town of Pennabilli, also in the Marches region , was
the birthplace of Father Francesco Orazio della Penna
(1680 – 1745), the Capuchin missionary who arrived in
Lhasa on 1st of October 1716 with Father Domenico da
Fano, the Prefect of the evangelical mission in Tibet.
And they weren’t the first. Other Capuchin fathers from
the “province of the Marca” had set off for Lhasa in the
steps of the French Father Francesco Maria de Tours who,
on his return from Indian missions, suggested to his
superiors, and through them to the Congregation de
Propaganda Fide that a mission be established in Tibet,
where he had heard that an ancient Christian community
still survived. Thus it was that a group of Capuchin
friars from the Marches left for India overland. They
were literally decimated by the terrible conditions of
the journey; some gave up, others died on the way. But
on the 12th of June 1707 the friars Giuseppe da Ascoli
and Franco Maria da Tours arrived in Lhasa. They had to
leave in 1711 as they were summoned to Chandagar, in
western Bengal, by the Vice Prefect who was reluctant to
let them die of cold. The Marches region has never been
famous for a sea or land lineage of conquerors, but
rather for many monks – Cassiano da Macerata, Carlo da
Castorano, Vito da Recanati, Costantino da Loro,
Cassiano Beligatti and many others – who set off for
unknown or little known lands, which were mere sketches
even on the maps of the great 17th century Dutch
merchants.
The evangelists and the Marches travellers took
Catholicism to the East, and sometimes healed with
western medicine; and they brought back from Asia much
more than religion, gold and spices: they introduced new
languages with strange scripts and strong aspirate,
dental and guttural sounds; they recounted the
extravagant wedding in Lhasa of a Chinese princess to a
Tibetan king – an inter-racial wedding unthinkable in
those times – of inaccessible monasteries with great
Buddhas, their gold faces smothered in incense, of giant
statues 60 metres tall and stone statues of Bodhisattvas
lying flat with the blissful and indefinable smile of
the Illuminated. The humble monks from the Marches
redrew the astronomical charts with their newer and more
sophisticated knowledge of mathematics and astrology. As
Father.Matteo Ricci wrote, “ they told us about certain
Saracens from the West who knew things about Europe,
India and Persia” and who, like him, visited the court
in Peking, and he talked about the many Muslims he had
met in China who “are in almost all the provinces with
their sumptuous mosques where they act, practise
circumcision and other ceremonies”.
Despite the fact that many others of his illustrious
countrymen focused their attention on Asia, and that he
soon had picked up difficult and abstruse languages,
Tucci’s early studies were on the Romans and the Marches
region. In 1911 at the age of seventeen he published his
first work, an article on Latin inscriptions recently
found in the countryside around Macerata, in the
prestigious Mitteilungen of the Germanic Archaeological
Institute. The following year he published “Research on
the personal Roman name in the Picene area” in Atti e
Memorie della Regia Deputazione di Storia Patria per le
Marche (Acts and Memoirs of the Royal Deputation of the
Nation’s History for the Marches). Right from that age,
which is normally a period of transition, of
self-discovery and of dreams, and marks the twilight of
childhood and the immature beginning of manhood, Tucci’s
character and personality, however, were clearly
delineated: he was already outlined as a scholar.
In his early writings we could perhaps catch his
admiration of the Marches, even though he always
insisted he was not bound to any place in particular –
and actually he was not bound – not even to his own
place of origin: he tried to be above and beyond them
all his life. And yet, in the twilight of his life,
after having mostly lived in the East since 1925, on the
14th of March 1959 in a speech he gave in Ancona at the
Merchants’ Loggia, Tucci finally declared his love for
the Marches, for its skies – pure and almost translucent
– and its hills – the gentlest in all of Italy – and
said that he often returned to his homeland and Macerata
to take in its vital air:
“This is why – let me end my speech with a vow – I wish
that from this homeland of mine, which I always return
to, to feed on its vital air, to discover new beauty in
its generous womb, to feast my eyes upon its pleasant
hills, and dream beneath its skies, someone else might
continue this tradition of which we should be proud.”
And on the 29th of June 1961 in another speech in the
same town in the Marches he said:
“I’m not easily moved, even though when I’m far away
nostalgia inevitably makes me think of our skies and
hills; there’s a deeper reason , which for a scientist
is more plausible: I mean that if ever there was a place
where there ought to be a section of IsMEO, then that
place is here in the Marches region. We people of the
Marches are naturally curious and wandering; and are
particularly attracted to the East, invited by the sea”.
As a boy, Tucci had to leave his home town in order to
attend courses at the R. University of Rome where his
teacher was another great oriental expert, Carlo
Formichi from Naples (1871 – 1943). Formichi soon became
spokesman for Italy and, as he himself put it, “bearer
of Mussolini’s message abroad”. Meanwhile, Tucci had
learnt more: in 1913 and 1914, on the eve of the First
World War, he published works on Asian anthropology and
prehistory, and on the rites and customs of the ancient
Persians. This young 20-year-old became a leading
Italian expert on Iranian culture and Sanskrit. He
published “Osservazioni su Fargard II del Vendidad
(Studies of Fargard II of the Vendidad)” and “Nota sul
rito di seppellimento degli antichi persiani
(Communication on the Burial Rites of the Ancient
Persians)”. During the same period a lifelong passion of
his started: the work of Lao-tzu and Chinese philosophy.
He also published a short essay on “Il Tao e il Wu-wei
di Lao-tzu (The Tao and the Wu-wei of Lao-tzu)”, as well
as “Note sull’Asia Preistorica (Notes on Prehistoric
Asia)” in Rivista di Antropologia (The Anthropological
Review).
Although he never gave up his passion for Taoism and
Lao-tzu, Confucius and Chinese language and literature,
most of the time he dedicated to them was up to 1922.
His extensive knowledge of that language and culture
was useful for his famous comparative studies and his
translations from Sanskrit and Tibetan, which he
continued until the 1950s. He compared the Tibetan and
Chinese versions of manuscripts to correct or complete
the Sanskrit texts, the originals of which had been
destroyed or lost.
From 1916 to 1918 he took part in the First World War,
and was discharged as a reserve lieutenant. While he was
a soldier he wrote his first letter to Giovanni Gentile
(1875 – 1944) whom he had met through Formichi. He
became a colleague and, so to say, a friend of the
philosopher’s until the death of Gentile, who supported
Tucci’s missions in India, Tibet, Nepal and the minor
states in the Himalayas, and together with him in 1933
he was able to found the Institute for the Middle and
Far East (IsMEO).
Tucci’s particular interest was in Buddhist texts which
had been translated from the original Sanskrit into
Tibetan in the early centuries A.D., and taken to Tibet
and from there to China and then Japan, and to
south-east Asia by itinerant monks and learned men who
wanted to spread the Good Law, the Dharma of the Buddha.
And he became a Buddhist because, as he said,
“I found Buddhism much simpler. It is simply an ethical
doctrine. Everything is based on sincerity and you are
completely free.”
Thanks to his vast knowledge of the East and to his 58
works including translations, essays and scientific
reviews which he had already published in 1925, Tucci,
who was secretary in the Library of the House of
Deputies, was appointed professor at the University of
Rome and then was sent by the Ministry of Education to
Shantiniketan, the famous “Abode of peace”, which was
founded and financed by the Bengalese Nobel Laureate
Rabindranath Tagore (1861 – 1941). Here Vishva-bharati
flourished, the school of universal culture based on
traditional Sanskrit schools, and the best of Indian and
international cultures mingled. Tucci had been summoned
by Formichi who taught Sanskrit; there he was to teach
Italian language and culture.
In Shantiniketan he distinguished himself for his vast
knowledge, which he increased with discussions in
Sanskrit with local pandits, by studying Bengali and
Hindi, and with his learned yet empathetic interest in
the local culture, so much so that Tagore told Formichi:
“ I must mention your former pupil, Dr. Tucci, who is
still with us and for whose services I cannot thank your
Government enough. He has brilliantly studied and deeply
understood the greatest period in Indian history, as
well as the biggest part of the other phenomena of
ancient Indian culture; he has pursued the triumphal
spread of Buddhism to remote regions, guided by
practically illegible signs on ancient ruins buried in
the sand, through documents of an amazed history, which
has forgotten its own language. Better than anyone he
can remind Indians today of their ancestors’ most
glorious self-revelations. I’m talking about the ideal
of universal sympathy put into practice… ”
Tucci left Shantiniketan and went to live in Kolkata,
Dakka and the northern regions, particularly Kashmir,
until early 1931. But, as another great man of the time,
the historian of religions Mircea Eliade, was to say in
the obituary a few months after his death, he was a
“prodigious traveller and a tireless explorer”. Around
1928 Tucci made his first exploratory trip to Tibet,
forerunner of the actual scientific missions that were
to follow. He made at least eight such trips to the Land
of the Snows and six to Nepal, a compulsory stop on the
way to Tibet. Tucci took with him a doctor and
photographer, who on the expeditions to Tibet in 1937
and 1948 was the then very young and astonishingly
handsome future professor and writer Fosco Maraini (1912
– 2004); a cook; porters; servants; a guide and a “lama”
– a Tibetan monk who negotiated the purchase of
manuscripts and works of art with the abbots of the
monasteries, and interpreted and explained to Tucci the
complex symbolism and the composite religiousness of
Tibetan Buddhism. Sometimes his wife went with him. They
were “comfortable” journeys, well-equipped, in countries
where roads – where they existed – were mule tracks,
and whose peoples were hospitable but spoke local
languages, with inevitably strange food and customs,
with a caravan of between 60 and 70 people and dozens
of animals such as mules, horses, chickens and dogs; all
the photographic and film equipment; crates of food
such as pasta, olive oil – “an indispensable source of
vitamins”, as Tucci said – tinned tomatoes and parmesan
cheese; and boxes of weapons, rifles to be precise, as
this was a land of saints but also of robbers who raided
the caravans especially, and they too had pistols, as
Tucci wrote in his travelogs.
These expeditions are recounted not only in scholarly
books like the four volumes of Indo-Tibetica (1932 –
1941) but also in the two famous books Tibetan Painted
Scrolls (1949) on Buddhist scroll paintings called “tangkas”.
The 798 pages and 256 colour plates in these books are
still today essential reading for the study of Tibetan
culture and are a valuable testimony of the religious
iconography of Tibetan Buddhism, which has been largely
lost, dispersed or stolen.
Tucci also wrote travel diaries which, although pleasant
to read, are books of a lofty tone. I want to cite some
of the best known: Santi e briganti nel Tibet ignoto
(Saints and Brigands in Unexplored Tibet) 1937) and A
Lhasa e oltre (To Lhasa and Beyond) (1950) on Tibet, and
Tra giungle e pagode (Among Jungles and Pagodas)” (1953)
and Nepal: alla scoperta dei Malla (Nepal: To the
Discovery of the Mallas) (1960) on Nepal. He also wrote
articles, and by 1953 he had published 227; one of these
is on Matteo Ricci, published in the Annals of the R.
University of Macerata in 1941.
Meanwhile, on his return from India he had become
professor of Chinese at the Oriental University
Institute in Naples and then, thanks to Gentile, he
became Full Professor of Indian Philosophies and
Religions at the University of Rome “La Sapienza”.
In 1933 Tucci and Gentile founded the IsMEO and became
respectively Vice-President and Director of the
language, culture and economics courses, and President.
The main aim of this Institute was to promote cultural
relations between Italy and south, central and eastern
Asia, and to study the economic problems of those
countries. The activity concerning political-economic
aspects is recorded in numerous monographs and in the
periodicals Bollettino dell'Istituto italiano per il
Medio ed Estremo Oriente (Bulletin of the Italian
Institute for the Middle and Far East) (1935), and
Asiatica (1935 – 1943). The economics programmes,
however, took second place to the cultural and
scientific ones which, right from the start, were
inspired and influenced by Tucci’s activity. In 1944,
when Gentile was killed, the Institute ceased its
activities and started up again in 1947 with Tucci. He
started a fruitful dialogue with Sen. Giulio Andreotti,
who at the time was already the Vice-President of the
Council. The relationship ended only at Tucci’s death.
In 1933 he started to publish also on Japan; all in all,
several articles and two books. For political reasons,
in 1937 Mussolini ordered the Minister for the Press and
Propaganda, Dino Alfieri, to create the “Society of the
Friends of Japan” in Rome. This was as a friendly reply
to Baron Okura, President of the Italo – Japanese
Society, who had donated several works to the Museum of
Oriental Art, founded by Tucci as part of the IsMEO (and
now named after him). In 1937 Tucci was sent to Japan to
strengthen ties between the two countries. Over there he
also made a speech in Japanese, giving greetings from
Mussolini, who was heard on the radio “as far away as
Manciukuò”, in China. He established the Italo-Japanese
Cultural Institute in Tokyo and in Kyoto, obtained study
grants for Japanese students and scholars to come to
Italy to study Italian culture, he established a
programme of cultural exchanges for teachers and
students, and tied up economic agreements. Between 1941
and 1943 Tucci founded the monthly magazine Yamato to
strengthen the ties between Italy and Japan, where he
also published 12 short articles. As well as being a
voracious scholar, an insatiable traveller and a
tireless explorer, he was also an untiring worker and
writer endowed with marvellous energy and health.
When Tibet became inaccessible after the Chinese
invasion, Tucci undertook scientific missions in
extremely difficult and unexplored territory in western
Nepal, birthplace of the Hindu civilization which had
remained almost intact for a thousand years. The country
was governed by the despotic family of the Prime
Minister Rana alongside a puppet king. It was a
xenophobic country with the borders closed around its
own people and closed to foreigners, except for the very
few who, as Formichi wrote, went there for ‘lofty
motives of study’. Tucci was at once admired for his
excellent Sanskrit which he spoke fluently and for the
ease with which he learnt Nepalese. He became friends
there with the greatest poets of the time and a
follower of the learned Royal Preceptor Hem Raj Sharma,
the court astrologer and astronomer, the head of all the
Brahmins in the kingdom, the Prime Minister’s adviser,
the King’s tutor, the supreme Judge and Minister for
Sanskrit and Nepalese Education (the country is
multi-ethnic with many religions even though the
majority are Hindus). He lent and had valuable
manuscripts of Indology and Buddhist logic copied for
Tucci. For months at a time Tucci, eager to learn, read
together with him extremely complex philosophical texts
in his huge private library in the centre of Kathmandu
of over 25,411 books, 10,000 of which were manuscripts.
From 1956 to 1962 he organized and led the
archaeological expeditions in the Valley of the Swat in
Pakistan; in 1957 he headed those in Afghanistan, and
in 1959 those in Iran. He directed all these ventures,
which included important restoration work and the
foundation of local museums until 1978. During this
period he founded and directed periodicals such as East
and West (1950 – 1984). Thus at the age of 62 he began a
new period of work and study with excavation work, a
period which he himself admitted was one of the happiest
in his life.
By the time he was 83 he had published 349 books and
articles, mainly scientific; then, until a year before
his death, ten reviews, encyclopaedia entries,
introductions to other books and presentations. Among
these was the speech he gave to the Academic Institute
of Rome in 1976 when he was awarded the “Jawahrlal Nehru
Prize for International Understanding” by the Indian
government, a real prophetic spiritual testament. It was
the only one among the nine prizes, the eleven honours
and the twelve national and international academic
titles bestowed upon Tucci that he really loved to show
off.
In 1984, shortly before his 90th birthday, he died at
San Polo dei Cavalieri, a village 651 m above sea level
high in the southern mountain range dominated by Monte
Morra, in the natural park of Monti Lucretili, situated
42 km to the east of Rome. He loved it because, as he
used to say, it was “surrounded by bleak, steep
mountains” which reminded him of Tibet.
I would like to finish this brief presentation with the
words of my teacher’s teacher about the Marches region
and its travellers. After a long circular journey which
had taken him far away to explore the most inaccessible
places in Asia, Tucci, who had set off from this region,
came back to it, as if he himself was an ideal link
between this land and the lands of the East:
“How can you explain that right in our region, the
Marches, and above all in our province of Macerata, were
born most of the few Italian oriental experts, or,
better, those who penetrated the most inaccessible parts
of Asia?
Just think:
Matteo Ricci from Macerata paved the way to China and an
impossible Franciscan mission that lasted in Lhasa in
Tibet from 1703 to 1745: it included Giovanni Francesco
da Camerino, Domenico da Fano, Giovanni da Fano,
Gregorio da Lapedona, Giovanni Francesco da La pedona,
Orazio da Pennabilli, author of the first Tibetan
dictionary, Cassiano Beligatti da Macerata, author of a
basic Tibetan grammar book, Tranquillo da Apecchio,
Costantino da Loro and Floriano da Jesi.
It is as if, by some kind of arcane affinity active in
the spiritual world or in the lightness of ether,
certain sons of this most pleasant land replied to a
call from remote civilizations; or, as they would say in
India, it would be an unthought of return to a distant
homeland, lost and rediscovered through the difficult
path of continual death and rebirth.
This unexplained attraction between the Marches and the
East, anticipated in the journeys of Ciriaco d’Ancona
and which was to become the unwitting echo of the
solitary poet from Recanati – who, once torn the veil of
Maya, had the dubious privilege of discovering the
infinite vanity of everything beneath the deceit of life
– paid off over the centuries in the mission of Matteo
Ricci.”
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3/7/1935 - Tibet, Gu-ge, sPu-rang-rdzong (Taklakot)
- Giuseppe Tucci seduto. Foto: Eugenio Ghersi
1954 - Nepal - Giuseppe Tucci legge un manoscritto,
alla sua sinistra la moglie Francesca Benardi
1919 - Roma - Giuseppe Tucci assorto nella lettura.
Foto: anonimo
1954 - Nepal - Giuseppe Tucci sotto la stele
contenente la genealogia dei Re Malla.
Foto: Francesca Benardi
1952 - Nepal - il poeta Dulamani Devikota recita
qualche verso a G. Tucci.
Foto: Francesca Benardi
1/7/1935 - Tibet, Gu-ge, Kho-char (Khojarnath)
Giuseppe Tucci insieme a Nandaram e gente di
Kho-char.
Foto: Eugenio Ghersi |
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