Centro Studi di Civiltà e Spiritualità Comparate


Responsabile
Francesco Piraino
francesco.piraino@cini.it


Segreteria
tel.: 041 27210228
email: civilta.comparate@cini.it

Tiziano Terzani (Florence, 14 September 1938 - Orsigna, 28 July 2004) was a reporter and a writer. He witnessed and scrupulously narrated major 20th-century events on the Asian continent, where he lived for thirty years. A polyglot traveller driven by a great curiosity, throughout his life, he explored the significance of international political-religious issues and the human condition in the face of modernity and historic social changes. Presented to the Fondazione Cini in January 2014 at the behest of his wife Angela Terzani Staude, the Tiziano Terzani Archive is characterized by the unusual variety of kinds of documents, typical of personal archives. Mainly concerning his professional activities, they include handwritten preparatory texts for the publication of articles and books, handwritten and typewritten notes related to his work as a journalist, notebooks, personal diaries, press cuttings, personal and professional correspondence, postcards, photographs (positives and negatives), maps, study material and also civic and school records. The archive also contains posthumous documentation collected by the family. The considerable amount of material makes it possible to accurately reconstruct Terzani's life, his movements and his journalistic collaborations. Not ordered according to customary archival criteria, the original archive was a collection of papers that the Florentine traveller produced or used in the course of his work as a journalist and writer. It was thus an archive created by and for his work. As such, it required re-organising, in a way that we might describe as being as "light" as possible. This was done by adopting a description to contextualise and reconnect the lost links between the papers, without resorting to dissertations or philological hypotheses, or creating an ideal reorganisation. Today the overall collection of the documents is divided into nine inventory series: Personal Papers, Writings, Diaries, Notebooks, Professional Activity, Correspondence, Press Reviews on Terzani, Photographic Collection, and Posthumous Material. The reordered Terzani Archive consists of 214 folders, containing 388 files. The presentation of the archive was preceded by the donation of Terzani's library in 2012. It comprises about 6,200 books organised in four thematic areas: geography, art, periodicals, and education. There is also a large section consisting of books in Oriental languages, mainly dealing with Asia.

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