After a first stint as a journalist with Il Giorno, in 1971 he moved to Singapore as a reporter, with his German-descent wife, Angela Staude, and their two small children, as the Asian correspondent for the German weekly Der Spiegel.
The Fall and Liberation of Saigon, recounts the takeover of Vietnam's capital by the Vietcong and the scramble of the last Westerners to escape with American helicopters; he stayed there for some time and witnessed the changes.
Two years later he nearly died while trying to document the new "Democratic Kampuchea": the Khmer Rouge tried to execute him after his arrival in the border town of Poipet, and he saved his life only by his knowledge of the Chinese language.
In what is perhaps his most well-known book, Un indovino mi disse (A Fortune-Teller Told Me), Terzani describes his travels across Asia by land and sea following the advice and warning from a fortune teller in Hong Kong that he must avoid aeroplanes for the whole year of 1993.
The book was born as a response to the anti-Islamic invectives published by the Italian journalist and author Oriana Fallaci on the daily Il Corriere della Sera on 29 September 2001.
In his last book Un altro giro di giostra (One More Ride on the Merry-go-round), in 2001, Terzani deals with his illness, a bowel cancer which eventually led to his death in 2004, but not before he had travelled and searched through countries and civilizations, looking for a cure and for a new vision of life.
He returned to Italy, spending the last months of his life with his wife and grown son in Orsigna, a little village in the Apennine Mountains in the province of Pistoia that he considered "his true, last love".
His testament book La fine è il mio inizio (The End Is My Beginning), co-authored with his son Folco, was published posthumously in March 2006 and sold 400,000 copies in 4 months.
[5] It is underlined there that his experiences as a student (shishya) in the ashram of Swami Dayananda in 2004 have not persuaded him to "convert" to Hinduism, and that he was generally sceptical about New Age (e.g. in Un altro giro di giostra, 2004).