On March 11, 2020 the Chinese embassy in Rome promoted Chinese coronavirus aid shipments sent to Italy using the hashtag #forzaCinaeItalia. Between March 11 and 23 2020, investigative news outlet Formiche reported that 46.3% of the tweets reusing the hashtag #forzaCinaeItalia (“Go China! Go Italy!”) were posted by bots. Formiche also reported that 37.1% of the tweets with the hashtag #grazieCina (“Thank you China”) published over the same period were posted by bots. At the same time, Chinese diplomats and state media were actively highlighting the Italian people’s purported thankfulness towards China. Beside the narrative convergence, many of the accounts amplifying these pro-Chinese narratives on Twitter bore the same hallmarks of inauthenticity observed by experts in others cases of Chinese information manipulation campaigns. Particularly egregious was the fact that the same bots also included EU-related hashtags in their tweets, shaming the organization for its inaction on coronavirus. At the end of March 2020, the parliamentary committee in charge of Italian intelligence publicly announced that an infodemic that could be traced back to “external state actors” was targeting Italy.