Studying nomads comes naturally to Nicola Di Cosmo, associate professor of Chinese and Inner Asian History, who has held bit parts in Chinese movies, carried oxygen tanks for the Venetian health department and rebuffed wrestling challenges by drunken Mongolians in the middle of Gobi desert.

"It's been a meandering path," Di Cosmo says, his words marked by a broad Italian accent, with a constant, slightly self-conscious smile hovering on his lips as he speaks. "Some people know what they're going to do from the onset. I've been the opposite."

On the walls of his office, pictures of plaster figures of dinosaurs found in Mongolia, a reproduction portrait of a Manchu by a Jesuit and a scroll written in Jurchen calligraphy, an extinct language from northern China. Then there are his bookshelves, where books about everything from Dharma art to Bronze Age transportation are written in languages including French, Italian, Russian, Chinese, Japanese and Arabic.

Clearly, this is the office of a man interested in many cultures--so how did he end up studying Inner Asia, the central Asian region once crossed by people as diverse as Alexander the Great, Buddhist monks and Marco Polo?

"I guess you can characterize my move towards China as a passion that started after I had already made the decision that I wanted to study a foreign culture and language, but had not made a decision until I really got into it," Di Cosmo says. "Same thing for Inner Asia, by the way; as I tasted it, I became hungry for more! Isn't it how it usually happens?"

Di Cosmo, a native of Italy, became fascinated by ancient cultures and texts in high school, where he studied ancient Greek and philosophy, among other subjects. At the University of Venice, he chose to major in Oriental Studies.

"I started studying Arabic, Russian and Chinese," recalls Di Cosmo, who now teaches Manchu, the language of the last imperial Chinese dynasty, along with his Inner Asian history classes. "But then I realized I couldn't study both Arabic and Chinese, so I dropped Arabic. I studied Chinese literature, language and history."

To do research for his final dissertation on the Qing dynasty, Di Cosmo spent one year at the University of Nanjing in China, where his interest in Inner Asia and the nomadic groups that inhabited it grew.

However, no one would accuse Di Cosmo of locking himself in the library.

"While I was writing my thesis, I also worked as a freelance journalist." Di Cosmo says. "One day, a Chinese director I interviewed drafted me to be in his film, Xi-An Incident, where Chiang Kaishek is kidnapped. I played an American military officer who was invited to a ball. I had to learn how to waltz for the scene, but then again, I got to dance with a very attractive actress."

After his brief foray in Chinese cinema, Di Cosmo came back to Venice in 1982 to finish his thesis.

"Then, I was unemployed," he says ruefully. "I did lots of jobs--part-time librarian, courier, translator..."

Di Cosmo's luck changed in 1984 when he won a scholarship from the Italian Ministry of Education to study abroad at a graduate program.

"I was just about to take a job interpreting at that year's Venice film festival," Di Cosmo recalls. "But two days after I was notified, I was on a plane to the U.S."

Di Cosmo's destination was a university in Bloomington, Indiana, where, ironically, he went through "incredible" culture shock--much more than when he was in China.