From the proclamation of the People’s Republic in 1949 to Mao Zedong’s death in 1976, a large number of Italian writers, journalists, and intellectuals travelled to China, disseminating their travel impressions in various forms. All of them must have had Marco Polo’s Milione in mind and more or less unconsciously took it as a model for their experiments in cultural mediation. None of them, of course, ever had the possibility of witnessing the traumatic reality of Mao’s China. The country they had access to, was a shadow play, a counterfeit, utopia-like China staged for the sake of foreign delegates, onto which they projected the hopes and disillusions they had been nurturing about their own country.

The workshop Shadow Play, held at the University of Warwick on 28 September 2024, enabled us to to compare and discuss some of these works, tended between idealization and disillusion, patronizing Orientalism and bitter self-reflection: travel writings such as the memories, among others, of Goffredo Parise, Alberto Moravia, and Edoarda Masi, literary works such as Luigi Malerba’s Le rose imperiali, or Michelangelo Antonioni’s controversial documentary Chung Kuo. Cina. Thanks to the moderation of Dr Qian Liu, Head of Translation and Transcultural Studies at Warwick SMLC, Dr Linetto Basilone (University of Auckland), Prof. Fabio Camilletti (SMLC Warwick), Dott. Jacopo Francesco Mascoli (SMLC Warwick), and Dr Gaoheng Zhang (University of British Columbia) engaged in a productive discussion, whose next step will be a forthcoming workshop on Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, the model of Marco Polo, and Sinophilia in 1970s Italy.