'Quanti insegnamenti ho tratto da quell’Italia perennemente arsa dal sole!' Le 'Lettere da un viaggio in Italia' di Li Jianwu

This chapter examines a specific case study of Chinese travel writing, conceived as a literary phenomenon intrinsically tied to the transnational mobility of Chinese intellectuals in Italy during the first half of the twentieth century. While Italy did not attract Chinese visitors on the same scale as other European nations, its post-unification emergence as a modern nation-state and cultural interlocutor made it a site of intellectual interest. During the late Qing and early Republican period, Chinese reformers and students looked abroad for models of institutional, social, and cultural renewal, with Italy figuring within this broader landscape of transnational encounters. The creation of government-sponsored study-abroad programs after 1912 allowed Chinese intellectuals, whose motivations were often artistic and exploratory rather than strictly political, to travel to European countries, including Italy. Their sojourns frequently resulted in essays and travelogues that today allow scholars to reconstruct the cultural imagination of Italy within Chinese discourse. Within this context, the chapter focuses on Letters from a Journey to Italy (Yidali youjian 意大利遊簡), published in the 1930s by Li Jianwu 李健吾 (1906-1982), a prominent figure in modern Chinese literary and cultural circles. After an outline of the genesis and structure of the work, the study provides a brief account of its thematic and stylistic features. It argues that Letters from a Journey to Italy not only reflects the specificities of Sino-European encounters during the Republican era but also occupies a distinctive position within the broader corpus of modern Chinese travel writing.