Luciano Petech

Samding Dorje Phagmo Luciano Petech (8 June 1914, Trieste – 29 September 2010, Rome) was an Italian scholar of Himalayan history and the early relations between Tibet, Nepal and Italy.

His subject was the dramas and stories of the great Italian author Luigi Pirandello, who had recently died two years after being awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

With the outbreak of World War II, as an Italian enemy alien in British India, Petech spent most of that time in a civil internment camp.

At the end of this period, the foreword to the anthology of his selected articles, made to mark his retirement, praised his ‘objective, calm and sensible judgment, his willingness to cooperate, and his learning’ (Petech 1988: viii).

In his books on Ladakh, Nepal and Tibet from medieval to modern times, his approach has the outward appearance of “history”—unimpeded by philosophy or superstition—unlocked through a serious and critical engagement with historical sources that are described before any of the events described in them.

As Elliot Sperling wrote in his 1995 review: ...since the 1949 publication of Giuseppe Tucci’s Tibetan Painted scrolls [and in] the absence of any single monograph dedicated to the public, this last work was often taken by default as the main secondary source on the subject....[While] “Central Tibet and the Mongols” is a relatively short work and leaves a few subjects less than fully explored... [it] is now the basic secondary source to which students of Yuan-Tibetan relations must turn.