'I will never forget' warm hug with President Xi, says young puppet fan

Nine-year-old Antonio Tancredi Cadili is a big fan of puppet theater, a time-honored form of entertainment in his hometown on the Italian island of Sicily.

Among his favorite puppet operas is the epic romance The Madness of Orlando. Since he found out that the fair princess in the tale of war and love, Angelica, was from China, he could not help thinking about the ancient country in the East.

When he came to know that President Xi Jinping would travel to Sicily during a state visit to Italy in March 2019, an idea popped up in his mind: How about a puppetry performance for the leader of China? He proposed it to Gianfranco Micciche, president of the Sicilian Regional Assembly, and, to his excitement, got the green light.

"I couldn't wait to see him," said the boy. He tried hard to picture what his encounter with Xi would be like. Yet what happened went far beyond what he had imagined.

In the medieval opera, Orlando, one of Charlemagne's paladins, lost his sanity after his beloved princess Angelica from Cathay, a poetic name for China, was married to Saracen knight Medoro. Like a furious beast, Orlando tore off his armor and threw away his sword.

That was the episode Antonio performed for Xi and his wife Peng Liyuan at Palazzo dei Normanni, one of the oldest royal residences in Europe and now the seat of the regional assembly. He had rehearsed repeatedly for the show.

The ardent fan of the Opera dei Pupi, or the Opera of the Puppets, owns a collection of nearly 40 puppets from Catania and Palermo, two different schools of puppetry in Sicily.

To Antonio, the puppets are like brothers. The boy would sit down with them on the floor and talk about his day at school.

The performance for the Chinese president was a big success. And to the boy's surprise, Xi gave him a hug. It was so warm that it felt like one between two old friends meeting again after a long time, Antonio recalled.

To eternalize this encounter, Antonio, who had been learning piano for one and a half years, composed a melody and named it The Hug.

"I will never ever forget it," he said.

In Micciche's memory, Antonio's puppetry show turned out to be one of the most memorable moments of Xi's trip to Sicily. As part of the message that the cultural links between Sicily and China have existed for centuries, it gave a glimpse of the inter-civilizational interaction between Italy and China.

Sicily, in the central Mediterranean Sea and an important hub on the ancient Silk Road trade routes connecting the East and the West, enjoys a long history of exchanges with China.

It was through a Sicilian Jesuit missionary that many Europeans learned about Confucianism. During the 17th century, Prospero Intorcetta, known to the Chinese as Yin Duoze, compiled an influential Latin overview of Chinese history and published Latin translations of some Chinese classics.

'Most exciting' things

The connections between Sicily and China are what Micciche treasures most. "These are the most exciting and important things," he said.

Antonio said he is now a fan of Chinese puppetry. He found this new love in November when he was in China's city of Quanzhou in Fujian for a puppet festival.

In his encounter with Xi, the president told him that a puppetry tradition like the Opera dei Pupi also exists in Fujian and invited him to the province.

Chinese puppets have more strings than Sicilian ones, which normally have two to four, making them harder to operate, the boy said.

Yet the boy's trip to Quanzhou, an important port of the ancient Silk Road, testifies to a trend in China-Italy ties that goes far beyond puppetry.

Before arriving in Sicily, Xi and Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte witnessed in Rome the signing of a memorandum of understanding on cooperation within the framework of the Belt and Road Initiative, or BRI.

Pointing to Sicily's geographic advantages in the BRI cooperation, Mayor Leoluca Orlando of the Sicilian capital of Palermo said that with Xi's visit, the region is poised to become the BRI's gateway to the Mediterranean.

That visit, said the mayor, has created a historic opportunity for Sicily to strengthen ties with the world's second-largest economy.

The catalytic effect is already being felt. The number of Chinese visitors surged to 10 percent of the total of foreign tourists to the island just one month after Xi's visit, Micciche said.

Xinhua