History of Sinology/Chapter 12

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Chapter 12: Italy — From Matteo Ricci to Contemporary Italian Sinology

1. The Ricci Legacy: Italy as Birthplace of European Sinology

No country can claim a longer or more consequential role in the European encounter with China than Italy. From Marco Polo’s Divisament dou Monde in the late thirteenth century to Matteo Ricci’s epoch-making mission at the turn of the seventeenth, from the Jesuit ethnographies that shaped the Enlightenment image of China to the postwar revival of professional sinology at Rome, Naples, and Venice, Italian scholars, travelers, missionaries, and diplomats have stood at every decisive turning point in the history of Western engagement with Chinese civilization. As the distinguished Italian sinologist Giuliano Bertuccioli observed, for a very long period of European history, “the contact between China and the West can be said to have been essentially the contact between China and Italy.”

Yet Italian sinology is also, paradoxically, a young discipline. After the suppression of the Jesuit order in 1773, Italy entered a prolonged period of relative inactivity in Chinese studies — what Bertuccioli called an “empty window” (finestra vuota) — that lasted, with brief interruptions, until the middle of the twentieth century. The rebirth of Italian sinology after the Second World War, under the leadership of figures such as Bertuccioli, Lionello Lanciotti, and their students, represents one of the most remarkable stories of institutional reconstruction in the modern history of the humanities. Contemporary Italian sinology, though smaller in scale than its French, German, or American counterparts, has produced work of the highest distinction, particularly in the fields of Sino-Italian relations, classical Chinese literature, Ming-Qing social and cultural history, and the study of the Jesuit mission.

The arc of Italian sinology runs from the medieval travelers through the great age of the Jesuit mission, the long hiatus of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the postwar revival that has made Italian Chinese studies once again a significant force in international scholarship.

2. Medieval Italian Travelers and the Discovery of Cathay

2.1 The Mongol Peace and Italian Merchants

The Mongol conquests of the thirteenth century created the conditions that made direct European contact with China possible. The Pax Mongolica — the period of relative peace and stability across the vast Eurasian empire — opened overland routes that Italian merchants were among the first Europeans to exploit. The Florentine merchant Francesco Balducci Pegolotti, in his commercial handbook Libro di Divisamenti di Paesi, described a trade route from the Don River port of Tana through the Central Asian steppe to China, assuring his readers that “whether by day or by night, the route is entirely safe… if you travel with sixty companions, you will be as safe as in your own home.”

It was Italian travelers — friars and merchants — who produced the most influential medieval European accounts of China. Giovanni di Pian del Carpine, the Franciscan emissary who reached the Mongol court in 1246, was the first European to leave a substantial written record of the Mongol world. His successor Willem van Rubroeck, though Flemish, transmitted his account through the networks of Latin Christendom in which Italian churchmen played a central role. But it was Marco Polo whose narrative transformed European consciousness of China, and whose legacy would echo through centuries of Sino-European relations.

2.2 Marco Polo’s Enduring Influence

Marco Polo’s Divisament dou Monde (1298) has been treated in detail in Chapter 1 of this volume, but its significance for the history of Italian sinology deserves further emphasis. The book’s impact extended far beyond geography: it stimulated the secular imagination of Renaissance Italy, presenting “a China of flesh and blood before European eyes,” and creating what one scholar called “a symbol of a new Italian dream-life, an ideal kingdom of worldly aspiration.” Christopher Columbus’s annotated copy of the Divisament survives in Seville as a monument to the book’s role in inspiring the Age of Discovery.

For Italian sinology specifically, the Polo legacy established a tradition of Italian engagement with China that subsequent generations would consciously invoke. When Matteo Ricci arrived in China in 1583, he was aware that he was following in the footsteps of his medieval compatriots. When the twentieth-century sinologist Bertuccioli wrote his magisterial Italia e Cina (Italy and China), he began his narrative with the earliest contacts between the Roman Empire and the Han dynasty, tracing an unbroken arc of Italian fascination with China across two millennia.

2.3 The Franciscan Mission in Yuan China

Between Marco Polo and the Jesuits, several Italian Franciscans made significant contributions to European knowledge of China. Giovanni di Montecorvino (1247–1328), who arrived in Beijing (Dadu) in 1294 bearing letters from Pope Nicholas IV to the Yuan emperor, effectively founded the Catholic Church in China. His three surviving letters to Europe constitute authentic documentary evidence about late Yuan-dynasty society. Odoric of Pordenone (c. 1286–1331) traveled extensively through southern China for six years, visiting Guangzhou, Quanzhou, Fuzhou, Hangzhou, Yangzhou, and Nanjing, producing the most geographically wide-ranging descriptions of Chinese cities that any European had yet attempted. Giovanni de’ Marignolli, who arrived in Dadu in 1342 as a papal envoy, was received with ceremony by the last Yuan emperor and presented him with a horse that inspired five poems and odes in the Yuanshi xuanji.

These Franciscan accounts, though less famous than Marco Polo’s, contributed materially to the European image of China and maintained the Italian connection with the Far East during the decades before the great age of maritime exploration.

3. The Jesuit Mission: Italy’s Greatest Contribution to Early Sinology

3.1 Michele Ruggieri and the Foundations of Missionary Sinology

The history of the Jesuit mission to China, and thus the history of systematic European sinology, begins with an Italian: Michele Ruggieri (1543–1607). Born in Spinazzola in southern Italy, Ruggieri held two doctoral degrees in law and had served in a municipal office before entering the Society of Jesus. He arrived in Macau in 1579 and, following the directive of the Jesuit Visitor Alessandro Valignano that missionaries entering China “should learn Chinese speech and writing,” immediately began studying the Chinese language.

The difficulties Ruggieri encountered illuminate the immense challenge that faced the first European students of Chinese. In a letter to the Jesuit Superior General, he described his experience with remarkable candor:

The Father Visitor wrote to me, ordering me to learn the Chinese language and script, advancing equally in reading, writing, and speaking. I immediately obeyed the command with all my strength. But the Chinese language and script are unlike not only those of our country but those of every other country in the world: there is no alphabet, no fixed number of characters, and each character has its own meaning. Even for the Chinese themselves, it takes fifteen years of hard work to be able to read their books.

Ruggieri’s initial method of learning was the picture-recognition technique used by children. As he explained in a 1583 letter: “At first it was very difficult to find a teacher who could teach me Mandarin, but I absolutely had to learn it for missionary work… So I found a teacher, and could only learn the Chinese language through pictures: he would draw a horse, tell me that this animal is called ma in Chinese, and so on for everything else.” Despite these obstacles, within two years and four months Ruggieri could recognize 15,000 Chinese characters and had begun reading Chinese books; within three years, he was writing in Chinese.

Ruggieri’s most significant scholarly achievement was the first translation of a Chinese classic into a European language. In 1593, his Latin translation of portions of the Daxue (Great Learning) was published in Rome by the Jesuit scholar Antonio Possevino in his encyclopedic Bibliotheca Selecta. Although this partial translation attracted little immediate attention, it was a landmark in the history of Western sinology: the first time that a text from the Confucian canon had been rendered into a Western language. The complete manuscript of Ruggieri’s Latin translation of the Four Books survives in the Italian National Library in Rome.

Ruggieri also compiled a Portuguese-Chinese dictionary to assist future missionaries in learning Chinese, and wrote the first Christian catechism in Chinese, the Zuchuan Tianzhu Shijie (The Ten Commandments of the Lord of Heaven, Handed Down from the Ancestors). He was also the first European Jesuit to establish a permanent residence in mainland China, securing permission to settle in Zhaoqing in 1583 — a breakthrough that owed much to his fluency in Mandarin and his ability to correspond with Chinese officials in their own language.

3.2 Matteo Ricci: The Father of European Sinology

If Ruggieri laid the foundations, it was his companion and successor Matteo Ricci (1552–1610) who erected the edifice of European sinology. Born in Macerata in central Italy to a noble family, Ricci entered the Society of Jesus at the age of nineteen and studied at the Roman College under the German Jesuit mathematician Christopher Clavius — the “Teacher Ding” (Ding laoshi) whom Ricci would later mention to his Chinese interlocutors. Under Clavius’s guidance, Ricci mastered mathematics, astronomy, and the techniques of instrument-making — skills that would prove indispensable in gaining access to the Chinese elite.

Ricci arrived in Macau in 1582 and spent the remaining twenty-eight years of his life in China, dying in Beijing in 1610. His genius lay in what later scholars have called the “accommodation strategy” (accommodatio): the policy of presenting Christianity as compatible with Confucianism and adapting European learning to Chinese cultural forms. This strategy required Ricci to undertake a profound study of the Chinese language and the Chinese classics. As the Ming intellectual Li Zhi observed of Ricci: “He has read all the books of our country, hiring tutors to correct his pronunciation, engaging scholars learned in the Four Books to explain their deeper meaning, and enlisting experts in the Six Classics to elucidate their commentaries.”

Ricci’s De Christiana Expeditione apud Sinas

Ricci’s most important sinological work was his Italian manuscript Della Entrata della Compagnia di Gesu e Christianita nella Cina (On the Entry of the Society of Jesus and Christianity into China), which he began composing around 1607 and left unfinished at his death. This work was translated into Latin by the Belgian Jesuit Nicolas Trigault and published in 1615 as De Christiana Expeditione apud Sinas, becoming an immediate sensation across Europe.

The original Italian manuscript, rediscovered in the Jesuit archives in 1909, was first published by the Jesuit Tacchi Venturi in 1911–1913, and subsequently re-edited with extensive scholarly annotations by the Italian sinologist Pasquale D’Elia in 1942–1949. Comparison between Ricci’s Italian original and Trigault’s Latin version reveals significant differences: Trigault omitted or modified passages that might have appeared too favorable to Confucianism, reflecting internal Jesuit debates about the accommodation strategy.

The first book of the work constitutes what Ricci himself described as a comprehensive report on China, covering its geography, natural resources, industry and commerce, scholarship and the examination system, administrative institutions, customs and manners, and religious beliefs. Ricci was conscious of the superiority of his account over those of previous European writers: “We have lived in China for almost thirty years, and have traveled through its most important provinces, and we have had friendly intercourse with the nobles, high officials, and distinguished scholars of this country. We speak the native language, have personally studied their customs and laws, and — last but most importantly — we have devoted ourselves day and night to studying their literature.”

Ricci’s observations were remarkable not only for their scope but for the critical intelligence he brought to bear. After carefully studying Chinese history spanning four thousand years and consulting Chinese historians, he offered a striking assessment of Chinese foreign policy: “Although they have well-equipped armies and navies and could easily conquer neighboring countries, neither their emperors nor their people have ever thought of launching wars of aggression. They are very satisfied with what they already have and have no ambition for conquest.” He added, with near-satirical intent: “The nations of the West seem to be worn out by the wild ambition of supreme rule, and in the end cannot even hold on to what their forebears left them; the Chinese, however, have preserved theirs for a thousand years.”

The De Christiana Expeditione was the first European work to introduce Confucius and the Confucian classics to a wide European readership. It laid the groundwork for the Enlightenment fascination with Chinese philosophy and governance. As the historian Fang Hao concluded: “Europeans first began to translate the Chinese classics, to study Confucianism and Chinese culture as a system, and to feel the influence of China in politics, economics, literature, and religion — all of this originated in this period” inaugurated by Ricci.

3.3 Martino Martini: The Father of Chinese Geography

Martino Martini (1614–1661), born in Trento in northern Italy, was the next great Italian Jesuit sinologist. He arrived in China in 1643, at the very moment when the Ming dynasty was collapsing, and spent most of his career in Zhejiang province. Despite the chaos of the Ming-Qing transition, Martini pursued systematic research, carefully measuring the latitude and longitude of every province he visited, drawing precise maps, and recording the natural environment and local customs.

Martini’s Latin works constituted the most important European publications on China between Ricci’s De Christiana Expeditione (1615) and the late seventeenth-century flowering of Jesuit scholarship. His three principal works were:

The Bellum Tartaricum (Tartar War, 1654): Completed during his voyage back to Europe and published simultaneously in Antwerp, Cologne, London, Rome, and Amsterdam, this was the first European eyewitness account of the Ming-Qing dynastic transition. Based on firsthand experience and Chinese sources, the Bellum Tartaricum described the Manchu conquest, the fall of Beijing, Li Zicheng’s rebellion, and Wu Sangui’s decision to invite the Manchu armies through the Great Wall. It was praised for its coolness, objectivity, and analytical depth, and is still regarded as an indispensable source for the history of the period. The work also profoundly influenced seventeenth-century European literature: playwrights and novelists across Europe drew on its dramatic narrative of dynastic collapse.

The Sinicae Historiae Decas Prima (First Decade of Chinese History, 1658): This was the first systematic European history of China, covering the period from mythical origins to the end of the Western Han dynasty (1 BCE). Drawing on the Shiji, the Tongjian Gangmu, and other Chinese historical works, Martini produced a chronicle organized by reign and dynasty, with Chinese and Western dates given in parallel — the first time such a dual dating system had been used. The work was praised as “the earliest scientific, rigorous, detailed, and systematic work of Chinese history” produced in Europe, and was extensively used by Du Halde in compiling his encyclopedic Description of China in 1735.

The Novus Atlas Sinensis (New Atlas of China, 1655): Martini’s masterpiece, this was the first European atlas of China produced using scientific cartographic methods. It contained seventeen maps — one general map of East Asia and sixteen provincial maps — each hand-colored, with precise latitude and longitude grids. The atlas combined European surveying techniques with the content of Chinese geographical gazetteers, providing information on administrative divisions, place-name etymologies, climate, natural resources, mountains and rivers, major cities, population, customs, and notable historical figures. Notably, in the map of Fujian province, Martini clearly indicated Taiwan as Chinese territory under the jurisdiction of Fujian. The Novus Atlas Sinensis was recognized as the highest achievement of seventeenth-century European cartography of China, and retained its authority until Du Halde’s Description appeared in 1735. Martini was honored with the title “Father of Chinese Geography.”

Martini also wrote a Grammatica Sinica (Chinese Grammar), the first European work on Chinese grammar, though it survived only in manuscript form and was never published.

3.4 Giuseppe Castiglione and Other Italian Jesuits

The Italian contribution to the Jesuit mission extended well beyond the sphere of textual scholarship. Giuseppe Castiglione (1688–1766), known in China as Lang Shining, served as a court painter under three Qing emperors — Kangxi, Yongzheng, and Qianlong — for over fifty years. Castiglione developed a distinctive hybrid style that merged European techniques of perspective, shading, and anatomical accuracy with Chinese compositional principles and painting media. His monumental works, including equestrian portraits, battle scenes, and depictions of Qianlong’s campaigns, became icons of the Qing court’s self-representation and exemplified the creative possibilities of Sino-European artistic encounter.

Other notable Italian Jesuits included Giulio Aleni (1582–1649), known as “the Confucius of the West” (Xi lai Kongzi) in Fujian province, who wrote prolifically in Chinese on geography, philosophy, and Christian doctrine; Sabatino de Ursis (1575–1620), who collaborated with Xu Guangqi on hydraulic engineering texts; and Lodovico Buglio (1606–1682), who translated Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae into Chinese. Each of these figures contributed to the massive enterprise of cultural translation that defined the Jesuit mission and laid the foundations of Western sinology.

3.5 Prospero Intorcetta and the Translation of the Classics

Prospero Intorcetta (1625–1696), a Sicilian Jesuit, arrived in China in 1659 and was assigned to Jiangxi province to work on translating the Four Books. In 1662, he published Sapientia Sinica (Chinese Wisdom), containing a Latin translation of the Daxue and portions of the Lunyu (Analerta). During the anti-Christian persecutions of 1664–1665, Intorcetta and twenty-five other European missionaries were confined in a church in Guangzhou; during this forced captivity, he completed a Latin translation of the Zhongyong (Doctrine of the Mean), published in Guangzhou (1667) and Goa (1669) under the title Sinarum Scientia Politico-Moralis (The Political and Moral Science of the Chinese). He also wrote a brief Latin biography of Confucius, Confucii Vita.

Intorcetta’s name appeared first among the editors of the landmark Confucius Sinarum Philosophus (Confucius, Philosopher of the Chinese), published in Paris in 1687 — the work that made Confucian philosophy accessible to European intellectuals for the first time and profoundly influenced the Enlightenment. Through this work, Intorcetta “made Europe know Confucius and made an outstanding contribution to the dissemination of Confucian thought in Europe.”

3.5 Matteo Ripa and the Foundation of the Naples China College

Matteo Ripa (1682–1746), a priest of the Propaganda Fide, arrived in Beijing in 1710 and served as a court painter under the Kangxi Emperor. When he returned to Italy in 1723, he brought four Chinese students and their teacher, and with papal approval founded the Collegio dei Cinesi (Chinese College) in Naples. The college’s primary purpose was to train Chinese-born clergy, but it also became a center for Chinese language instruction and research — the first dedicated institution for Chinese studies in Italy and one of the earliest in Europe.

Ripa’s two-volume memoir, the Giornale (Journal), composed in his old age, provides a detailed account of his years at the Qing court and his travels through China, including careful observations of court life, landscape, and customs. The Italian-language original was published for the first time in 1996 by the Istituto Universitario Orientale in Naples, with scholarly introduction and annotations by the sinologist Michele Fatica.

The Naples Chinese College survived through successive institutional transformations: it became the Reale Accademia Asiatica (Royal Asian Academy) after Italian unification in 1870, and was eventually elevated to university status as the Universita degli Studi di Napoli “L’Orientale” in 1925. This institution, the direct descendant of Ripa’s eighteenth-century foundation, remains one of Italy’s most important centers for Chinese studies today.

4. The Long Hiatus: Italian Sinology from 1773 to 1945

4.1 The Suppression of the Jesuits and Its Consequences

The suppression of the Society of Jesus by Pope Clement XIV in 1773 dealt a devastating blow to Italian sinology. The Jesuits had been the principal vehicle through which Italian scholars engaged with China; with their dissolution, the institutional infrastructure of Italian Chinese studies largely collapsed. For over half a century after the suppression, the Jesuit scholars who had formed the backbone of European sinological research fell silent, and the pace of Sino-Western intellectual exchange slowed markedly.

Simultaneously, the prolonged political fragmentation of the Italian peninsula — Italy was not unified until 1870 — diverted national energies away from distant cultural engagements. While France, Britain, and Germany were building colonial empires and establishing university chairs of oriental studies, Italy remained consumed by internal political struggles. In this environment, there was little motivation for Italian scholars to learn Chinese or study Chinese civilization. The result was what Bertuccioli called an extended “empty window period” in which Italian sinologists were “few and far between” and no work of lasting international significance was produced.

As Bertuccioli noted, these two factors combined to end Italy’s leading position in European sinology, ceding that distinction to France, where Remusat’s appointment to the first chair of Chinese at the College de France in 1814 inaugurated the era of professional academic sinology. It was a bitter irony: the nation that had given Europe its first sinologists — Ruggieri, Ricci, Martini, Intorcetta — now found itself a latecomer to the discipline those men had created.

4.2 The Nineteenth Century

Throughout the nineteenth century, Italian sinology produced few works of lasting significance. The most notable exception was Angelo Zottoli (1826–1902), a Jesuit who arrived in Shanghai in 1848 following the Society’s restoration in 1814. Zottoli’s five-volume Cursus Litteraturae Sinicae (Course of Chinese Literature, 1879–1883), published in Shanghai in bilingual Chinese-Latin format, was the most comprehensive Western anthology of classical Chinese literature produced before 1950. Though Zottoli’s Latin was sometimes criticized as “somewhat abstruse,” the work demonstrated a genuine mastery of the Chinese literary tradition and, in the context of the emerging professional sinology, represented a transitional work between missionary and academic scholarship.

4.3 Pasquale D’Elia: The Last Missionary, the First Professional

The interwar period produced one Italian sinologist of the first rank: the Jesuit Pasquale D’Elia (1890–1963). D’Elia spent years as a missionary in China, acquiring fluent Chinese and deep knowledge of Chinese culture and historical sources. He was “almost the only important Italian sinologist between the two world wars.”

D’Elia’s most enduring achievement was his critical edition of Ricci’s writings, the Fonti Ricciane (Ricci Sources), published in 1942–1949. Building on the earlier edition by Tacchi Venturi, D’Elia provided exhaustive annotations and commentary, identifying Chinese personal and place names, verifying historical dates and events, cross-referencing Chinese literary and documentary sources, and offering detailed analysis of Ricci’s interpretations of Chinese culture. The result was a work that remains, to this day, the “official version” for scholars studying Ricci and the early Jesuit mission.

D’Elia’s work was both a culmination and a bridge. As the last great representative of the Italian missionary-sinological tradition inaugurated by Ruggieri and Ricci three and a half centuries earlier, he brought that tradition to its scholarly apotheosis. At the same time, through his brief tenure at the University of Rome, he directly influenced the two young scholars — Giuliano Bertuccioli and Lionello Lanciotti — who would become the founders of postwar Italian professional sinology. D’Elia’s personal temperament was difficult: Bertuccioli later recalled that he was “obstinate and proud,” had “not a single friend” in the academic world, and spent his final years “plagued by illness and disappointment.” Yet his scholarly legacy was formidable, and his influence on the next generation proved decisive.

5. The Postwar Revival: Professional Italian Sinology

5.1 The Devastation and Reconstruction

The state of Italian sinology at the end of the Second World War was dire. Chinese language instruction had virtually ceased; when the war ended in 1945, Italy had only one professor of Chinese — D’Elia himself, then at the University of Rome. The number of students, as Lanciotti recalled, “could be counted on the fingers of one hand.”

The reconstruction was led by three institutions and the scholars associated with them: the University of Rome, the Universita Orientale in Naples, and the Ca’ Foscari University in Venice. Bertuccioli at Rome, Lanciotti first at Rome and then at Venice and Naples, and Mario Sabattini at Venice became the nuclei around which a new generation of Italian sinologists was trained. The Istituto Italiano per il Medio ed Estremo Oriente (Is.M.E.O.), founded by the great orientalist Giuseppe Tucci, provided additional institutional support through its language courses in Rome, Milan, and Turin, and through two important periodicals: East and West (an English-language quarterly founded in 1951) and Cina (an Italian-language series edited by Lanciotti from 1956).

5.2 Giuliano Bertuccioli (1920–2001)

Bertuccioli was a polyglot of extraordinary range who mastered Greek, Latin, French, English, and German before beginning Chinese at the age of sixteen. He studied law at the University of Rome while simultaneously pursuing sinological training under D’Elia. In 1946, he was posted to Nanjing as a diplomatic attache at the Italian embassy, where his Chinese improved rapidly and he immersed himself in classical Chinese literature.

In 1953, Bertuccioli was posted to Hong Kong as Italian vice-consul, later rising to consul-general, a position he held until 1960. The seven years in Hong Kong were intellectually formative: freed from the demands of European academic life, Bertuccioli read voraciously in Chinese literature and historical sources, building the deep familiarity with Chinese texts that would distinguish his later scholarship. His first major work, La Storia della Letteratura Cinese (History of Chinese Literature), was published in Milan in 1959, while he was still in Hong Kong.

In 1969, Bertuccioli served on the Italian delegation that negotiated the restoration of diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China in Paris — a contribution to Sino-Italian relations that transcended the purely academic.

From 1981 to 1995 he held the chair of Chinese at the University of Rome, producing more than a hundred publications on Chinese literary history, Sino-Italian relations, the Jesuit mission, and Daoism, as well as numerous Italian translations of Chinese classical and popular literature.

Bertuccioli’s crowning achievement was Italia e Cina (Italy and China), written in collaboration with his younger colleague Federico Masini. This work traced the history of Sino-Italian relations from antiquity to the fall of the Qing dynasty. Bertuccioli wrote the first four chapters, covering the period from the Roman Empire to the eighteenth century, while Masini contributed chapters on the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The book was distinguished by the range and depth of its source base: Bertuccioli drew not only on the standard European sources but on Chinese official histories, unofficial histories, collectanea, literary collections, notebooks, archaeological reports, and the Chinese-language writings of the missionaries themselves. He discovered, for instance, in the Song-dynasty customs official Zhao Rugua’s Zhu Fan Zhi (Description of Foreign Peoples), “the first piece of Italian land” to appear in Chinese literature — the kingdom of Sikaliye (Sicily).

In the book’s final chapter, titled after the Confucian phrase Zi bu yu (“The Master did not speak of…”), Bertuccioli compared Italian and Chinese civilizations through the lens of daily life — family values, organized crime, finger-guessing games, noodle-eating, immigration — before arriving at a conclusion of enduring relevance: a nation that takes pride in its cultural heritage must strive to overcome national vanity and latent prejudice toward other peoples, embracing an attitude of openness toward foreign cultures. The two nations, he argued, should never come into conflict, “just as in past centuries they never truly did.”

5.3 Lionello Lanciotti (1925–2010)

Lanciotti, Bertuccioli’s fellow student under D’Elia at Rome, pursued advanced training abroad after completing his degree in 1947: first at Stockholm under the great Swedish sinologist Bernhard Karlgren, then at Leiden under J.J.L. Duyvendak. This combination of Italian, Swedish, and Dutch scholarly traditions gave Lanciotti an unusually broad methodological perspective.

From 1960 he held professorships successively at Rome, Venice, and Naples, and from 1956 he served as editor of Cina, the publication series of Is.M.E.O. that represented the highest level of Italian scholarship on China. Together with Tucci, he co-edited the quarterly East and West. In the 1980s, Lanciotti participated in the European Association of Chinese Studies project to catalog Daoist canonical texts, and produced an Italian translation of the Dao De Jing based on the Mawangdui silk manuscripts, published in Milan in 1981.

Lanciotti’s scholarly output encompassed Chinese language, literature, philosophy, religion, archaeology, and politics, with more than 150 publications. His most important works included La Letteratura Narrativa Cinese (Chinese Narrative Literature, 1960), La Letteratura Cinese (Chinese Literature, 1968), and Confucio: Vita e Insegnamento (Confucius: Life and Teaching, 1997). He also wrote a valuable survey, Breve Storia della Sinologia (Brief History of Sinology, 1977), that assessed trends and perspectives in the field.

5.4 Subsequent Generations

The students of Bertuccioli and Lanciotti established Italian sinology on a secure institutional footing and expanded its range considerably.

Mario Sabattini (b. 1940s), a student of Lanciotti, held the chair of Chinese language and literature at the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice from 1972 and served as secretary-general of the Italian Association of Chinese Studies (AISC) from 1988 to 1999. From 1999 to 2003 he served as cultural attache at the Italian embassy in Beijing, receiving the Chinese Government’s “Friendship Award for Chinese Language and Culture” in 2003. His primary research fields were Chinese history and the history of Chinese aesthetics; he was the first Italian scholar to study the modern Chinese aesthetician Zhu Guangqian’s engagement with Benedetto Croce’s philosophy, producing a monograph on the subject in 1984. Together with Paolo Santangelo, he co-authored a Storia della Cina (History of China), published in Rome in 1986.

Paolo Santangelo (b. 1943), based at the Universita degli Studi di Napoli “L’Orientale,” specialized in the social and cultural history of Ming-Qing China. His distinctive scholarly contribution was the study of emotional and attitudinal vocabulary in Chinese literature, particularly in works such as the Liaozhai Zhiyi (Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio). Through meticulous lexicographic analysis of texts, Santangelo explored how emotions were conceptualized, classified, and evaluated in late imperial Chinese culture, arguing that “what needs to be translated is not the words themselves but the entire culture; only then can one understand how a feeling is positioned within a systematic worldview, language, and mode of social life.” His works on the concepts of qing (emotion), yu (desire), and zui (guilt) in the Neo-Confucian ethical tradition constitute an original contribution to the comparative history of emotions.

Federico Masini (b. 1957), Bertuccioli’s successor at the University of Rome, made his reputation with The Formation of Modern Chinese Lexicon and Its Evolution toward a National Language: The Period from 1840 to 1898 (1993), a pioneering study of how Chinese absorbed foreign concepts through the creation of new vocabulary during the tumultuous nineteenth century. Masini argued that the differences between Chinese and Western cultural backgrounds made the translation of Western material, scientific, and philosophical concepts into Chinese a complex process of “thought and interpretation” rather than simple linguistic borrowing. The Chinese translation of this work, published in Shanghai in 1997, attracted wide attention in Chinese academic circles. Together with Bertuccioli, he co-authored Italia e Cina.

6. Institutions and Contemporary Directions

6.1 Major Centers

By the early twenty-first century, Italian sinology had developed a solid institutional infrastructure. Fifteen Italian universities offered Chinese language programs, with a total student enrollment of approximately three thousand. The three historical centers — Rome, Naples, and Venice — remained the most important, but Chinese studies had expanded to universities in Milan, Turin, Bologna, Florence, and elsewhere.

In 1988, the Italian Association of Chinese Studies (Associazione Italiana di Studi Cinesi, AISC) published a Bibliografia degli Studi Italiani sulla Cina (Bibliography of Italian Studies on China), documenting the lives and publications of Italian sinologists across four centuries — a useful stocktaking of the entire tradition.

6.2 The AISC and International Networks

A significant step in the professionalization of Italian sinology was the founding of the Associazione Italiana di Studi Cinesi (AISC) in the 1980s. The AISC provided a national forum for coordination among the various university departments and research institutions engaged in Chinese studies, organized regular conferences, and facilitated contacts with the European Association of Chinese Studies (EACS) and with Chinese academic institutions. Italian sinologists have been active participants in international scholarly networks, frequently hosting and attending conferences in Italy and abroad, and developing exchange programs with Chinese universities.

The role of the Istituto Italiano per il Medio ed Estremo Oriente (Is.M.E.O., later Is.I.A.O.), founded by the great Tibetologist and Indologist Giuseppe Tucci, deserves particular mention. Though Tucci himself was not a sinologist, the institutional infrastructure he created — including the periodicals East and West and Cina, the language courses, and the research programs — provided the organizational skeleton around which Italian sinology was rebuilt after the war. The Cina series, under Lanciotti’s editorship from 1956, published over thirty volumes of scholarly articles representing the highest level of Italian academic research on China.

6.3 Distinctive Characteristics

Contemporary Italian sinology possesses several distinctive features that reflect both the strengths of its tradition and the particular intellectual culture of Italian academia.

First, the study of the Jesuit mission and Sino-Italian cultural relations remains a central preoccupation. Italian scholars enjoy a natural advantage in this field, given their access to Vatican and Jesuit archives, their familiarity with Latin and early modern Italian, and the cultural proximity to the world from which Ricci, Martini, and their colleagues emerged. Bertuccioli’s late-career project of editing the Opera Omnia of Martino Martini, collecting his writings in Latin, Spanish, Portuguese, German, and Chinese, exemplified this tradition.

Second, Italian sinology has produced distinguished work in Chinese literary studies. The translation of major Chinese literary works directly from the original — rather than through English, French, or German intermediary versions — has become standard practice. Works ranging from the Three Hundred Tang Poems and the Dream of the Red Chamber to the fiction of Lu Xun, Lao She, Ba Jin, Mo Yan, and A Cheng have all appeared in Italian translation by qualified sinologists. In literary theory, the scholar Alessandra Rosanda produced the first Western-language translation of Liu Xie’s Wenxin Diaolong (The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons), a landmark of Chinese literary criticism, beginning in 1979.

Third, the study of Ming-Qing social and cultural history, particularly as pursued by Santangelo and his students, represents a genuinely original Italian contribution to the international study of Chinese civilization. The focus on emotions, mentalities, and the vocabularies through which cultures construct their inner lives connects Italian sinology to the broader traditions of Italian cultural history and the history of ideas.

7. Conclusion: An Old and Young Discipline

The trajectory of Italian sinology — from Marco Polo’s thirteenth-century revelations through the Jesuit golden age, the long nineteenth-century eclipse, and the postwar renaissance — represents one of the most dramatic arcs in the history of any national sinological tradition. As Lanciotti observed, Italian professional sinology developed “out of a desire to transcend Eurocentrism”; Italian sinologists have sought, with increasing self-awareness, to free themselves from the “Eurocentric” biases that earlier generations absorbed unconsciously. The study of Chinese language and culture, he argued, “is not motivated by curiosity or by a taste for exotic luxury, but by genuine cultural necessity.”

The paradox of Italian sinology — simultaneously the oldest and one of the youngest national traditions of Chinese studies in Europe — gives it a unique perspective. It is the only European sinological tradition that can claim direct continuity with the very origins of systematic Western engagement with Chinese civilization. Ricci’s accommodation strategy, his mastery of classical Chinese, his respect for Confucian thought, and his vision of intellectual exchange between civilizations of equal dignity established principles that remain relevant to the practice of sinology today. At the same time, the relatively recent reconstruction of Italian sinology as a professional academic discipline has allowed it to develop without the weight of entrenched institutional structures, adapting flexibly to new methodological approaches and new fields of inquiry.

As Bertuccioli concluded in Italia e Cina, the long history of Italian engagement with China offers a model for intercultural relations built not on force but on culture, not on conquest but on conversation. In this sense, the history of Italian sinology is not merely an episode in the history of scholarship; it is a chapter in the broader history of human civilization’s capacity for mutual understanding.

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References

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