After receiving the latest batch of medical supplies – 50,000 masks – this week from its sister city of Handan in north China, Italian city Padova’s deputy mayor Arturo Lorenzoni said they will be distributed to the “angels on the frontline.” The friendship counts amid the current pandemic.

The masks, the latest of a total of 450,000 from Guangzhou, Handan and Xi’an – all Chinese cities – will go to doctors, nurses, workers at homes for the elderly, police and civil servants in the city in northern Italy which has been hit hard by the coronavirus.