This book, Un Viaggio a Nias (A Journey to Nias) by Elio Modigliani, is an account of the author’s scientific and ethnological expedition to Nias. It includes a detailed description of his travels among the headhunting villages of Nias and his observations on the nature, history, customs and material culture of the island. The text is uniquely accompanied by nine original drawings by a Dutch navy captain, D.G.E. Wolterbeek Muller.Modigliani was born in Florence, Italy in 1860 and travelled to Nias in 1886. This was the first of his many explorations in island Southeast Asia. His work exemplifies the common concern with the taxonomy of human races, a characteristic of European ethnological writing in the nineteenth century.
