Italy arrived in Tianjin through the Boxer Rebellion. When the Boxers besieged the foreign legations in Beijing in 1900, Italy was among the eight nations that sent troops to break the siege. The reward came on September 7, 1901, when the Qing dynasty ceded a 46-hectare concession to the Kingdom of Italy. On June 7, 1902, the first Italian consul, Cesare Poma, took formal control. The concession lay on the Pei Ho river, southeast of the city center, alongside the other foreign districts. The Royal Navy stationed gunboats on the river, and Italy even held small forts near the Great Wall at Shanhai Pass and in Hankow -- an empire so far-flung and thinly stretched that it bordered on the fantastical.

In 1925, Benito Mussolini created the Battaglione Italiano in Cina -- an Italian battalion specifically for China -- and quartered it in the new Caserma Ermanno Carlotto within the concession. The soldiers came from the San Marco Regiment, Italy's naval infantry. After World War I, Italy had doubled its Tianjin territory by taking control of the former Austro-Hungarian concession, gaining the adjacent "Second Special Area" in 1920. By 1935, the concession's population had reached about 6,261, including 110 Italian civilians and 536 other foreigners. When the Second Sino-Japanese War began in 1937, wealthy Chinese families fled into the Italian district for protection, seeking refuge from Japanese forces behind the shield of European extraterritoriality.

The end came abruptly. On September 9, 1943, following Italy's armistice with the Allies, the Imperial Japanese Army moved to occupy the Italian concession. The Italian garrison of approximately 600 troops resisted initially but was overwhelmed and interned at Tangshan. In November, the prisoners were offered a choice: swear allegiance to Mussolini's new Italian Social Republic, or remain in captivity. Those who pledged loyalty received their personal weapons back and were put to work as labor troops for the Japanese. In July 1944, the Social Republic formally relinquished the concession to Wang Jingwei's Japanese-sponsored government, a transfer recognized by virtually no other nation on earth.

On February 10, 1947, the peace treaty with the Allied powers formally transferred the Italian concession to Chiang Kai-shek's Republic of China, closing a chapter that had lasted forty-five years and spanned ten Italian governors from Cesare Poma to Ferruccio Stefanelli. Today, the former concession is one of Tianjin's most distinctive architectural districts. Walking its streets feels like stepping into a small Italian town transplanted to the North China Plain -- piazzas, arcaded sidewalks, and Italianate facades that have no business being 8,000 kilometers from Rome. The buildings now house restaurants, galleries, and cultural venues, their Mediterranean proportions incongruously at home in a city where winter temperatures can drop below minus ten degrees Celsius.