“Turtle house was beautiful at night. The skyscrapers that grew around us took away more sun every day, but when night fell and Kamsing, the gardener, lit the torches hidden among the trees, the torches around the pond and the oil lamps at the foot of the statues of Ganesh and Buddha in the garden, the house returned to have that warm, quiet tropical magic that had brought you to Thailand (…) “
In recent months in Asia Tiziano Terzani came to my mind often and in some moments it was as if he were traveling with me or me with him, with his thoughts … Asia for me, a bit like him, has now become my second home and paradoxically I feel more comfortable in this part of the world than in Europe.
I had not planned to come back to Thailand, but have decided to take a trip to Myanmar with a friend, I found myself eating Pad Thai again, oh my God, so good! In short, being in transit in Bangkok, I decided that I could not miss the opportunity to go and see the house of Tiziano Terzani, after all, this is the beauty of traveling alone, making plans, messing up, and decide to visit a place that is important to you but that others do not care about. At the time when I first learned about this house, I did not know Terzani as I know him now, I had only read a few lines, articles about him and videos.
At that time, the news that the house of Terzani, Turtle House, was about to be shot down, struck me and saddened me a lot. Paradoxically, my knowledge of the writer became more intense because of this news. And then my solo travels began in Asia, my first trips to India, and how could I make me miss his readings ?!
I would have liked to know him, to talk to him, to a good man, to a world, a man who was somehow half-way between West and East, just as I often do, a man with such an intelligent, critical, open mind. A man whose values and philosophy of life I share.
Follow my motto of not postponing so, in this case, it made even more sense, because that house where Terzani lived with his family, most of his life, that same house in which he wrote some of his most famous works, was about to be destroyed, to make room for other useless skyscrapers.
And so, after being well informed on how to get there, I headed from my own to his house … I to walk through the streets of a part of Bangkok, not at all touristy, but mostly residential … I had, therefore , the fortune to visit his house, the one described in the book “a soothsayer told me” and to speak personally with the gardener who took care of the house since the days when the famous writer lived here ..
The feeling is still that of an oasis of green in the cement that probably according to Kamsing will soon disappear .. there are several Italians who pass by here so much that while trying to understand where was the house and its entrance some men they immediately understood what I was looking for… Kamsing asked me to write about the house and to continue to fight so that it would not be destroyed … not only in the name of Terzani but against this uncontrolled “progress” and chased to the West that little by little it is destroying the identities of various cities and places in the world. Bangkok like many other cities in Asia has changed dramatically over the years and will continue to do so; I really do not understand this race to the West, but to that West of which Asia has nothing to envy. Nowadays globalization is part of our reality, of our world, and it seems to me even anachronistic to speak of East and West in a world so “open”, within everyone’s reach and in fact in constant change, but then why not take advantage of it to grasp the better on both sides? I am convinced that both the West and the East have much to learn from each other and that they should do so to improve the lives of their societies.