East and West between «complementarity» and «mediation». Some reflections on Giuseppe Tucci’s notion of «Eurasia» and its intellectual sources

While the significance of Giuseppe Tucci’s work for many branches of Asia scholarship, and more broadly for contemporary culture, has been underlined by many critics, few – usually in a brief and unsystematic fashion – took to piecing together his thought, that is, that body of scattered reflections he disseminated in his works and through which he expressed his own vision of mankind and life, scientific research, and humanistic studies altogether. This paper aims to do so by calling attention to the notion of «Eurasia», which represents a pivotal element in the scholar’s body of thought, one he will reconsider more than once starting from the 30s. Although in his works Tucci never expounded this notion systematically, the reconstruction will however try to follow a number of leads on the matter found in most representative writings, while taking some suggestions from an historical and biographical examination of the scholar’s work. To this end, the article will also concentrate upon the intellectual sources that shaped Tucci’s notion of «Eurasia», such as the thought of Giovanni Gentile, Carlo Formichi, Rabindranath Tagore and the theosophical movement