Tucci was fluent in several European languages, Sanskrit, Bengali, Pali, Prakrit, Chinese and Tibetan and he taught at the University of Rome La Sapienza until his death.

He taught himself Hebrew, Chinese and Sanskrit before even going to university and in 1911, aged only 18, he published a collection of Latin inscriptions in the prestigious Zeitschrift des Deutschen Archäologischen Instituts.

After graduating, he traveled to India and settled down at the Visva-Bharati University, founded by the Bengali poet and Nobel Laureate, Rabindranath Tagore.

He was Italy's foremost scholar of the East, with such diverse research interests ranging from ancient Iranian religion to Indian and Chinese philosophy.

In 1933 he promoted the foundation the Italian Institute for the Middle and Far East [it] - IsMEO (Istituto italiano per il Medio ed Estremo Oriente), based in Rome.

Tucci officially visited Japan for the first time in November 1936, and remained there for over two months until January 1937, when he attended at the opening of the Italian-Japanese Institute (Istituto Italo-nipponico) in Tokyo.

The trip included an audience with the Dalai Lama in the Potala Palace and bumping into Heinrich Harrer author of "Seven Years in Tibet".

[7] Tucci was a member of the editorial board of an Italian propaganda magazine, Yamato, which was started in 1941 to improve the political alliance of Italy and Japan.

[8] He wrote popular articles for the Italian state that decried the rationalism of industrialized 1930s–1940s Europe and expressed a yearning for a more authentic existence in touch with nature, which he claimed could be found in Asia.