“Shanghai and Beijing in the Thirties of the 20th century in the descriptions of three Italian writers: Giovanni Comisso, Mario Appelius and Alberto Moravia”

At the beginning of the 20th century the general public in Italy still knew very little about contemporary China. The articles and writings published in that period on newspapers and journals and penned by well known Italian writers and journalists are the first direct information on China, they prompt interesting reflections and questions about a totally different cultural and political reality. In many of those writings we can feel how strongly the extraordinary experience of the journey affected the authors and also their feelings of moral and political responsibility involved in describing China in all its different aspects to the Italian readers. The writings of Giovanni Comisso, Mario Appelius and Alberto Moravia, three Italian writers, who had been to China in the thirties of the 20th century, studied herein, introduce three different human, cultural and political approaches to modern China. Giovanni Comisso perceives China as a bizarre and curious country, Mario Appelius is mostly moved by curiosity in his strolling around the streets of Beijing and Shanghai; while Moravia feels a sense of moral and political responsibility and tries to provide a description of China that goes beyond all the cliché and stereotypes, making the common reader thinking upon a very different and distant reality.