If 2020 has been declared a year of tourism and culture between Italy and China, the onset of Coronavirus does not end friendship but only leads us to change the way we communicate and promote mutual knowledge.
We will use more written stories and digital images and less real travel. We will use more imagination and creativity but we cannot stop working and let ourselves be overcome by fear.
Italy and China have in common for nearly three thousand years of history in which each in its own way has been the inspiration for great stories and culture. What would the western world be without Rome and Italy? And what would the East be without China?
We will work on these simple questions in the coming months to tell stories that are not known and to keep the light of our life on. After all, the great poet Dante made Ulysses say in the 26th canto of Hell: "you were not made to live like brutes, but to follow virtue and knowledge" (you were not created to live like animals, but to follow virtue and knowledge).
And with this we want to say that as human beings we feel for our Chinese friends from the depths of our hearts, and we will pursue the knowledge of Chinese history hoping to give relief to all our Chinese friends forced to stay at home, trapped between sadness and fear, and to all our Italian friends so that we will all be emotionally closer to the Chinese people.
We will overcome this and, if we are all united (emotionally), we will overcome it sooner and better. We have been surrounded by Chinese culture and the depth of Confucius' philosophy which resembles so much our way of living in Italy. Personally, I have already been to China 5 times and my daughter lived in Beijing for 3 months for her studies of the Chinese language.
The last time we were in Chengdu with the OBOR - One Belt One Road institute and we had the opportunity to visit the Panda area, the Leshan Buddha and the sacred mountain Emei.
We went to the Opera delle Fangiant Theater and tasted the famous cuisine of Chengdu, with the particular Sichuan pepper that we then gave to all our Italian gourmet friends, which UNESCO declared a city of gastronomy.
We didn't talk about this trip in our portal and in our blog but we had only made posts on social networks. From this moment we will begin to tell stories about the places we have visited in China to demonstrate our closeness to this beautiful country.
They will be stories that we hope will rekindle the light on a civilization that has no equal and on a culture that is still partially unknown to many of us.
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