Deeply in love with Portugal, he was an expert, critic and translator of the works of Fernando Pessoa from whom he drew the conceptions of saudade, of fiction and of the heteronyms.

Together with his wife, Maria José de Lancastre, he translated many works by Pessoa into Italian and has written a book of essays and a comedy about the writer.

[2][3] Antonio Tabucchi was born in Pisa, Italy, but grew up at his maternal grandparents' home in Vecchiano, a nearby village.

He specialized at the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa in the seventies and in 1973 he was appointed as a teacher of Portuguese Language and Literature in Bologna.

That year, he wrote his first novel, Piazza d'Italia (Bompiani 1975), in which he tried to describe history from the losers' point of view, in this case, the Tuscan anarchists, in the tradition of great Italian writers of a more or less recent past, such as Giovanni Verga, Federico De Roberto, Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa, Beppe Fenoglio, and contemporary authors, like Vincenzo Consolo.

In 1987, when I volatili del Beato Angelico and Pessoana Minima were published, he received France's Prix Médicis for best foreign novel (Notturno indiano).

In 1994 he released Gli ultimi tre giorni di Fernando Pessoa, as well as the novel that brought him the most recognition: Sostiene Pereira, winner of the Prizes Super Campiello, Scanno and Jean Monnet for European Literature.

The director Roberto Faenza drew from it the eponymous film (1995) in which he cast Marcello Mastroianni as Pereira and Daniel Auteuil as Dr. Cardoso.

The novel proved prophetic when police Sergeant José dos Santos later confessed to the murder, was convicted and sentenced to 17 years' imprisonment.

He wrote Gli Zingari e il Rinascimento and Ena poukamiso gemato likedes (Una camicia piena di macchie.

In it, 17 letters which celebrate the triumph of the word, which like "messages in the bottle", have no addressee, they are missives the author addressed to an "unknown poste restante".

Tabucchi considered himself a writer only in an ontological sense because from the existential point of view, he was glad to define himself as a "university professor".