I primi studenti italiani in Cina: Filippo Coccia, Edoarda Masi, Renata Pisu.

In 1956, just after the delivery of Kruscev's "secret speech" and the subsequent demolition of Stalin's reputation, Palmiro Togliatti, leader of the Italian Communist Party, gave a long interview to the magazine Nuovi Argomenti where he criticized the denunciations of the Soviet leader, and totally rejected Kruscev's accusation about the Single-party state as a limitation of the democratic system. To enforce his statement Togliatti took the newborn People's Republic of China as a model of an oriental nation not ruled by a the Singe-party state. This was the political and cultural scene that surrounded the first three Italian students who went to China in 1957: Filippo Coccia, Edoarda Masi and Renata Pisu. This paper is a brief presentation of their experience in China, a reconstruction of their discoveries and considerationa about a nation basically unknown to many at that time. Through their writings, we can have one of the first real vision of the historical and social events whic occured in China during that controversial period.