For many Italians of my generation, the idea of Asia arrived through the books of Tiziano Terzani before it arrived through any trip. So when I was in Bangkok in January 2018, I went looking for his house.
He called it the “Turtle House”: a wooden home hidden among trees and water, a short walk and a whole world away from the traffic. It was there, between one reporting trip and the next, that he found the quiet to write.
What I filmed was a building near the end of its life. From what I heard later, it may well have been knocked down since. So this short film has become a small record of a place that, for some readers, meant a great deal.
A book for the road
If you are heading to this part of the world, take Terzani with you. “A Fortune-Teller Told Me” (in Italian, “Un indovino mi disse”), the account of a year crossing Asia without ever getting on a plane, is where I would start. The house may be gone; the books are not.