Reportage, diario di viaggio e autobiografia: Un indovino mi disse è un libro che difficilmente dimenticherete sullo scaffale. Leggerlo stimolerà il vostro apparato pensante, troppo spesso intorpidito da squallidi programmi televisivi che quotidianamente veicolano messaggi omologanti. Corrispondente dall'Asia del settimanale tedesco Der Spiegel, Tiziano Terzani viaggia per un'intero anno via mare e via terra, evitando di prendere l'aereo: un indovino cinese, infatti, lo aveva avvertito di non vo More...

Non avevo mai letto niente di suo, e pur essendomi ripromessa di farlo la mia non era mai stata una risoluzione seria e concreta. Terzani sa come rapirti quando scrive: è come se ti prendesse per mano nei suoi viaggi e ti dicesse "vieni con me", ora ti mostro tutta una serie di posti che altrimenti, forse mai avresti visitato in vita tua. Nel 1976 un indovino cinese, incontrato casualmente ad Hong Kong, mise in guardia l'autore su una pericolosa maledizione che incombe sulla sua testa: nel 1993 More...

I found this book quite by chance in Heathrow airport and that in itself is apt. How good it would it be if we could all spend at least a year of our lives traveling only by land or sea? Forgive me for saying this but British ‘idiots’, like their American counterparts have sucked all joy out of air travel in their relentless pursuit of higher margins and lower fares and ‘secure’ airports, these days it’s all self-check-in and paying extortionate amounts for your excess baggage, it’s faceless, co More...

The premise is wonderful. A skeptical journalist is warned by a Hong Kong fortune teller to avoid air travel for the year 1993, and decides to heed the warning partially as a personal challenge (considering the amount of travel that his job requires) and partially to playfully indulge the superstition. So he travels by land and sea through Asia (as I am doing) and as he ruminates on how much more rich and alive the world becomes when eschewing airplanes & -ports, he gets into the habit of re More...

Tiziano Terzani's book is about his land journey across Asia through Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, China and Mangolia and then his return back to Thailand. But this is not your usual travelogue. He searches out the soothsayers, fortune tellers, astrologers and other mindreaders in Asia and asks them to prophesize his life. It all starts with a fortune teller in Hong Kong telling him to avoid flying all through 1993 and he decides to follow the advice. His narrative flits between More...

This book is very well written. I really like the author, he has a very easy-going and readable style; he's articulate, intelligent, observant, and deeply reflective. Whether you are interested his adventures in Asian countries and his thoughts on their cultural developments and how the west has impacted them, or his metaphysical musings and some surprising personal experiences as he searches out mystics, psychics, and fortune tellers, this books is a pleasure to read because the author is able More...

This travel book uses the device of the author's avoiding air travel due to a fortuneteller's prophecy to give the author an excuse to do several travels by land, mostly in SE Asia but also on a train trip to Italy. The travel parts are mildly interesting, though since the book is quite old, only of historical interest.

Unfortunately, he carries out his fortuneteller theme by consulting a randomly chosen fortuneteller everywhere he goes which could have been interesting, had he taken the time to More...

Quanta ricchezza ci lascia Terzani con questo libro...
Leggerlo è come viaggiare insieme a lui nelle affascinanti terre asiatiche, respirarne i profumi, ascoltarne la poesia e, purtroppo, disperarsi osservando il materialismo occidentale mentre cancella tradizioni, spiritualità e natura per trasformare quei paesi in grandi macchine da soldi.
Terzani affronta questo viaggio "via terra" poichè un indovino di Hong Kong ha predetto per lui un incidente aereo se avesse volato nell'anno 1993. Ma più c More...

I loved this book for many reasons. It was set in the Far East for a start and TT talks about the far East with such love and respect that is moving. Being a true story it had the perfect combination of real life such as the sociopolitical issues in Malaysia, Burma, China, Thailand etc that TT comes across and magic/superstition habits that have such a strong presence in the Far East still to this day. It also made me think a lot about the way we lead our lives, going from place to place without More...

Well this certainly started out promising enough. But oh, did it ever wear out its welcome.


The constant visits to fortune-tellers—while an obvious thread to have running throughout—drag because they're not given much context or significance.
"So I found this fortune teller who's the most respected in the area. I gave him or her some information—some right, some wrong. (S)he gave me some predictions—some right, some wrong. Should I be doing this? What merit does fortune-telling have? Let me rumina More...

I have never had the urge to travel to Asia in the way that I have had to travel to other places. But Terzani changed my mind about that. His love of Asia is so apparent in his writing that it is really hard not to fall in love too.
The premise of this book is that a fortune teller tells him he may die if he travels by plane in a certain year. So when that year comes, he decides not to travel by plane and get around by any and all other means available. He also visits several other fortune telle More...

il libro più bello che ho letto di Terzani. un viaggio, oltre che attraverso paesi lontani dalla nostra cultura e dal nostro modo di vivere, all'interno del proprio essere.la ricerca spasmodica di capire il senso della nostra vita.
l'accuratezza con cui descrive la "gente", il loro modo di affrontare la vita in tutte le sue sfaccettature, la tristezza nel rendersi conto che il mondo sta diventando sempre più un condominio sovraffolato senza più luce.
"Non sopportavo questa società di bottegai ar More...

Un reportage intenso per scoprire i particolari di un sub continente ancora misterioso ed intrigante.
Una lettura riflessiva che cattura grazie ad uno stile sobrio che non stanca mai.

Such an interesting premise - an AP Reporter is warned in the mid-70s that he will be in a plane crash in 1993. On December 31, 1992, he's in the middle of the jungle on an assignment and ruminating over whether to go about business as usual or heed the advice and take a trip (of another kind) of a lifetime.

This book is about so much more than superstition and old customs in a modern world. It's about Terzani's views and experiences of the world as he slogs though it, as opposed to pasing overh More...

I read this book slowly at the beginning. Slowly like the travels Tiziano makes through Asia. When he decides to follow what a fortune telle told him years before in Hong Kong, maybe he couldn't imagine how travels can change when you decide not taking a plane for a whole year, and keep on working as a journalist in Asia. This is a lovely book. Tiziano was a real traveller, not a tourist at all. He describes the bad and good part of every country he visits, but he never complains like tourist so More...

This was a book about travel and superstition in Asia. Sadly, it was also a book about the author's journey of discovery. At his best, Terazani tells wonderful anecdotes about his dificulties traveling the world in a year without airplanes, and does an excellent job of describing the characters he meets and the landscapes he visits. At his worst, he takes the opportunity to beat us over the head with his amateur philosophy and "thought-provoking" questions.

Especially in the early going, Terazani More...

I saw someone reading this on a tent-camping trip in southern Africa in 2010, and I was hoping she would finish it before our trip ended so I could borrow it (and maybe keep it), but no such luck. Eventually I remembered to search for it, and when I finally picked it up to begin reading, I was really delighted. First, the author (now dead) was a journalist, so his style is direct and to the point. Second, he’s traveling around Asia for most of the book (with a significant outward trip to Italy, More...

I loved this book. It is the haunting story of a middle aged Italian journalist from Florence whose lifelong beat has been Asia. He has lived and worked there most of his life and watched it go through wars and "development." In 1976 a fortune teller in Hong Kong tells him that he will die in a plane crash in 1993 so he shouldn't fly that year. It's a long way off but years pass and when 1993 comes, now in his late 50's Tiziano Terzani decides he will organize his ongoing work so that he can go More...

In truth, this book made me wanted to visit laos and burma, the only two asean countries that my teva yet to set foot on. :)

Interesting quotes and extracts from the book:
"Life is full of opportunities. The problem is to recognise is them when they present themselves and it isnt't always easy."

"Travel is an art and one must practised it in a relaxed way, with passion, with love."

"Love the one you marry, not marry the one you love."

Love this short extract on Silence...and if you realise, the paren More...

A real interesting perspective on Asia in respect to fortune telling and superstitions. After reading the book I talked to many aquaintences I made while living abroad. More people believe in fortune telling than I expected. I met a Japanese teacher who told me she became a teacher because a fortune teller told her she would fail at her job working at an elderly home.

...The angst the author brought up against Asia rising towards western modernity was however old news.

A really fantastic book about a journey through Asia sans the use of an airplane. The reader really gets to see the world through Terzani's eyes. I enjoyed the montage of experiences, the poverty, the joy, the strength of belief, the greed that Terzani portrays.



Though many have attempted dispute of the so called "Asian Economic Miracle" Terzani may be one of the first to present a cogent human side to why things are perhaps not so perfect. He shows the loss in vivid color that has nothing to do More...

I enjoyed this book. Not "a real page-turner!" but one of those books that is just plain enjoyable and provides food for thought.

It is a recounting of a year in the author's life in the 90's. He had seen a fortune teller in the 1970's that told him not to fly that year, so he didn't. In not flying, the author was reminded again that life is about the journey, and that history, tradition, and the intelligence of thousands of years live outside of western "progress".

this travelogue had me in its grips all thru my SE asia trip. then i got home and found out from a pretty-reliable-but-extremely-cynical source, who had personal contact with the author, that terzani may or may not be a pathological exaggerator and jerk in real life. so now i don't know what to make of it.

well extramoral confusion doesn't detract from the book's merits, per se. the snapshots of singapore, thailand, hong kong, malaysia, indonesia, china, vietnam, cambodia, burma, and mongolia ar More...

Full disclosure - I stopped reading after 17%. I couldn't suffer through another page. I am astounded at all the 4- and. 5-star reviews. Every page was " fingernails on the chalk board" irritating. It was one continuous knee-jerk, sophomoric rant about the evils of modernity without even the slightest recognition that there might be some advantages too. But we're supposed to take the author seriously of course. Someone who actually puts stock in the nonsense spouted by this large group of crooks More...

What a fantastic book! Terzani has witty way of describing his adventures. I enjoy his head-on, let's think this through, sure why not behavior. It makes me feel that maybe the world isn't such a bad place after all if Terzani was able to travel throughout Asia and parts of Europe without flying!

This book really delves into the notion of the past that we are slowly running away from. Modernization is slowly stripping away cultural rich areas in way of consumerism. If you want to travel and see t More...

Interesting travel memoir. A friend gave it to me to read, as I am going on my honeymoon in the areas the author describes.
As a tourist/travel book, some of the portrayals were disturbing, but they were authentic, with vivid imagery and keen observations of this ever evolving and changing region. I loved his examination of the interesting dichotomy between modernization and superstition.

Lovely book I read it whilst travelling through Asia by bus and train so it really touched me and I could relate to his beautiful observations of the character of each country. I felt I went through most of what he went through, felt what he felt and saw what he saw.

Interesting insight into Asia cultures and beliefs regarding fortune tellers and great travel blog of it's time.

Tiziano Terzani qui incontra un indovino che gli fa una tragica previsione: se prenderà un aereo entro i prossimi anni, morirà! Allora Tiziano, più per ironia che perchè credeva che la previsione si avverasse, viaggerà per tutto l'anno in giro per il mondo, senza mai salire in un aereo... Divertente racconto dei suoi viaggi, mettendo al centro gli uomini e altre culture. Bello!

A gift at Christmas, I was intrigued by this premise, and enjoyed it thoroughly. His views, and his experience, which derive from an Italian writer for a German magazine, covering the Asian countries for his work, over the course of a year without using air travel to get around, were great fun and highly interesting to me as someone who has never been to Asia. He obviously has great abilities to move fluidly between cultures, and expresses his own distaste for the materialistic obsessions of the More...

Prima lettura 2010.
Libro celebratissimo, a cui si fa risalire la spiritualità di Terzani, è una ottima prova di giornalismo di viaggio, con molta autocelebrazione e una spiritualità secondo me un po' di accatto.
Verso la fine diventa anche stucchevole e noioso.
P.S. Non me ne vogliano i terzaniani convinti, forse semplicemente non è il mio genere.