The canal city of Venice is among the hot destinations for Chinese tourists to Italy. [Photo by Guo Anfei/China Daily]

Italian Ministry of Tourism expert Stefano Landi hopes this will not only inspire more Chinese to increase the current volume of 5 million inbound tourists a year－a segment growing at 15 percent annually－but also get them to stay longer.

The average international visitor stays in Rome for four days, for instance, while Chinese stay for two days.

"I hope that more Chinese tourists can stay a few days more in order to better experience the antiquity and fashion in Italy," Landi says.

"If not for Italy's antiquity, there wouldn't be hundred-year-old brands, and there wouldn't be so-called fashion."

This legacy of style has produced another type of Chinese visitors to Italy－businesspeople seeking to study how to best market their products.

Chinese brand-development organization Zheng Qi Hui, for instance, recently took 10 entrepreneurs to the country on a study trip to learn not only about Italy's clothing but also cars.

"We hope to learn how to apply these concepts in China," the organization's founder, Liu Yafeng, says.

"What is national is also international. I didn't quite understand the underlying meaning of this sentence until I came to Italy this time and realized that a national brand can have global influence."

It's perhaps ironic, then, that Italy's branded products－be they items or locations－are conjuring an allure for Chinese that makes the country, as a sum of its parts, a brand in itself.

Erik Nilsson contributed to this story.

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