As the
Corriere della Sera Asian correspondent, he went to China. On 11 December 1937, he was aboard the on the Yangtze Patrol in
Nanking at the prompting of
George Atcheson, a U.S. Embassy official. Also aboard were Universal News cameraman
Norman Alley, Movietone News'
Eric Mayell, the
New York Times's
Norman Soong, ''
Collier's Weekly correspondent Jim Marshall, and La Stampa'' correspondent Sandro Sandri
it. Atcheson had invited them aboard the Panay so that they could document the fall of the city from relative safety. The four journalists had been covering the ongoing Japanese invasion of China in the mid-1930s, and found themselves in the thick of things in early December 1937 as Japanese forces moved on
Nanking. According to Alley, writing in his memoir
I Witness, Atcheson proclaimed that aboard the gunboat the group would be "as safe as you would be on good old American soil." Little did any of them know that in just a week's time, the Panay would be attacked and sunk, Sandri killed, and that they would witness the
Rape of Nanking. During the attack Barzini, although wounded, performed heroically helping to bring the wounded ashore and providing first aid to the best of his ability. As Sandri, known as "the
Floyd Gibbons of Italy," was stretched out in the reeds with excruciatingly painful, fatal stomach wounds, Barzini could only comfort him with an occasional cigarette and a word from time to time. This episode of the incident was captured on Alley's and Mayell's cameras and in a 1937
Wide World Photos shot titled "Consoling dying Panay victim". ==Banned by the Fascists==