A biography of Giuseppe Tucci (1894–1984), the pioneering Tibetologist and Buddhologist whose body of work contributed to the shape and direction of several disciplines within Asian studies in the twentieth century, has long been a desideratum. This is not only on account of his influential contributions to Asian studies, but also because of the much debated—and still largely unresolved—issue of his collaboration with the fascist regime in Italy during the second quarter of the twentieth century, a period that saw Tucci's rapid ascendance in the ranks of Italian and international scholarship in concomitance with the consolidation of Mussolini's dictatorship. Unfortunately, the recent two-volume work by Enrica Garzilli does not fulfill this need, neither from the purely biographical perspective nor as an analysis of the importance of his political networking. This effort of almost 1,500 pages is at once prolix, contradictory, and fragmentary. It is confusingly laid out, repetitive, and in general contains much unsubstantiated data.

The book purports to delve specifically into Tucci's political connections, both during the fascist era, when Tucci, as the title proclaims, would have been “Mussolini's explorer,” and during the period of the Italian Republic, when Tucci's politically powerful sponsor would have been Giulio Andreotti, the ubiquitous face of the conservative party of the Christian Democrats from the end of World War II until his death. However, by trying to focus on Tucci's political connections, the author neglects the weight and scholarly impact of his opus, his groundbreaking ideas and discoveries, and his new (to Italy at least) method of combining explorations in situ with philologically rigorous deskwork. The pages devoted to Tucci's explorations (pp. 1:493–639, 2:5–40, 2:87–147, and 2:161–305) are long-winded summaries of Tucci's own travel diaries with the unfortunate addition of imagined dialogues between the participants in the expeditions (e.g., pp. 1:512, 1:516–17, 1:587–88, 1:592, and 1:594). The pages devoted to Tucci's scholarship are reduced to mere lists of his publications (e.g., pp. 1:274–75, 1:629, 2:305, 2:351–53) or brief, simplified, and simplistic accounts. In the most egregious example of this, the monumental Tibetan Painted Scrolls is dealt with in a little over a page (pp. 2:40–41).

One of the core problems is that while the author claims that the book is “biography” and “history” (pp. xviii and passim; but note also the publisher's website claims),Footnote ¹ and boasts of archival sources used (e.g., pp. xxiii–xxvi), as well as of “the scientific rigor of reconstructions based on interviews and original documents” (“il rigore scientifico della ricostruzione basata su testimonianze e documenti originali,” back cover), she also elects “to fictionalize history” (p. xl, in English in the original) and write “as if recounting to old friends” (“come se li raccontassi a dei vecchi amici,” p. xli). As a consequence, not only is the writing style colloquial (this would be only a minor fault), but the author feels free, throughout the book, to include her own life experiences and ponder on how they compare to Tucci's, or how they improve her understanding of him. These include, in random order, her yoga practice (pp. 1:635–36), her opinion of the sanitary conditions found in South Asian countries (pp. 1:222–23), her meeting with a sadhu (pp. 1:603–7), and many other diverting and off-topic personal anecdotes. All this because the author considers herself a member of Tucci's scholarly lineage, and sees her effort to discover more about him as a way to find out more about herself and uncover her roots (pp. 1:xli, 2:456). From such a standpoint, this work can by no means be considered a biography as the term is customarily understood.

Most importantly, Garzilli's book sorely lacks cohesion, rigor, and clarity. To begin with the issue of cohesion, it is a daunting task to provide a summary of how the book is organized. The succession of chapters only seemingly follows a chronological or thematic order, and within each chapter even the appearance of such an order is often and easily lost on account of the numerous thematic digressions of dubious interest and relevance. For example, chapter 5 deals with Tucci's early academic career and work, his marriage to Giulia Nuvoloni, his travels with Tagore in the mid-1920s, his relations with Mircea Eliade, the homicide of Ioan P. Culianu in 1991, a biography of Julius Evola, the myth of Shangri-la, Ippolito Desideri, and a list of Tucci's publications in the mid-1920s. And these are just in the first thirty-four pages.

The second issue concerns the academic rigor of this work. While a perusal of the bibliography indicates that the author did extensive research in numerous Italian and foreign archives, scavenging for letters, documents, meeting minutes, and newspaper articles, in fact the use of these sources for the core of the work is uncertain at best, since the majority of her statements, conclusions, and assertions are completely unreferenced. This is evidenced by comparing the total number of pages of the book (1,463) to the number of pages of footnotes (63): a disproportionate ratio indeed. One final remark on the question of the lack of academic rigor concerns the author's admission, in the introduction, that the sources consulted for her research were so numerous (“diverse migliaia di documenti,” p. xxv) that she did not list all the material used in the bibliography (“non ho certo riportato tutto il materiale usato,” p. xxvii).

The issue of the book's clarity goes hand in hand with those of rigor and cohesion. The entire book displays an inability to synthesize and extract salient points; the amount of detail provided by the author is staggering, because the data has not been sifted to separate what is relevant from what is not. Thus, the work provides the names of all the members of numerous committees (p. 1:423); the list of beneficiaries of extra contributions from the fascist government, which included the shoemakers' association in the village of S. Mauro Pascoli and the girls' orphanage in the village of Camerlata di Como (p. 1:437); and the list of the recipients of the Birendra Prajñālaṅkār award (p. 2:205).

A corollary of the overabundance of irrelevant data is apparent in the “index” of names provided at the end of volume 2. This includes a list of the names of all persons and deities mentioned in the volumes, followed by brief, dictionary definitions. These range from Abdul (“porter”) to Zoroaster, passing through Galbraith, John Kenneth, and Medici, Lorenzo de'. They seem to have been useful for the author herself while working, since they are certainly not useful to the reader; this so-called index does not provide page references for any of these names.

To conclude, L'Esploratore del Duce is partly a hodgepodge of conspiracy theories (Tucci was a mason, a mystic, a theosophist, an agnostic, an atheist, a Buddhist, a Catholic), partly a memoir of the author's experiences, and partly an exercise in information overload. Whether Tucci really was Mussolini's explorer, which is not satisfactorily and definitively demonstrated here, he remains the most important Italian Orientalist of the twentieth century and a seminal figure in the field of Tibetology. He certainly deserves a more serious biography.