After months of antigovernment protest and civil unrest in Hong Kong, Ms. Lo, an English major, said she had been eager for her semester abroad and her first trip to Italy. She flew to Bologna nine days before she was scheduled to, worried that her exchange program might be suspended because of the virus.

“I thought coming to Italy would mean that I could actually go out for a bit,” she said.

Instead, she says she got long, hard stares at the Bologna airport, and wondered if it was because of her face mask, which she had worn for the entire 16-hour flight. She took a bus to central Bologna — and soon after she got there, someone slashed her backpack open and stole her wallet, she said.

A passer-by took her to a police station to file a report. But when she presented her Hong Kong passport, she said she was asked to wait outside, where she began to shiver in her thin sweatshirt. Ms. Lo said she was eventually allowed to file a report, but has not heard back about her wallet, though she was given a phone number to call if she developed symptoms of the coronavirus.

A spokeswoman for the Bologna police said that controls on people from countries considered at risk for the coronavirus had begun the day that Ms. Lo came in, and that the officers at the desk were required to make sure she had been checked.

Ms. Lo was also taken aback by her treatment at Intesa Sanpaolo, a bank where she tried to open an account so her parents could wire her money. At one branch, a teller told her that she could not open an account because she did not speak Italian. At another, she said she was escorted out by an employee who told her, apologetically, that she had to leave because she was from “the zone of the coronavirus.”