The Dalai Lama arrived in Milan on Wednesday for an 11-day Italian visit that will include an audience with lawmakers.

'We hope the relevant countries will proceed from the standpoint of bilateral friendship...and not provide venues or support for the clique's separatist activities,' Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang said when asked about the visit.

The Tibetan Buddhist leader will not appear in the assembly hall of the Italian Parliament but in a side room, according to House of Deputies Speaker Fausto Bertinotti.

It seems few official meetings are on the visitor's schedule, although he is expected to be in Rome for four days from Dec 12.

And there are no plans by the Vatican for a papal audience, despite earlier reports that there would be one.

'I'm sorry I won't meet him,' the Dalai Lama said yesterday about Pope Benedict XVI, whom he met last year.

The Vatican's decision, according to Italian media reports, prompted Beijing to give its consent to an ordination on Tuesday of a new bishop in Guangdong, southern China, who had the Holy See's approval.

A meeting between the Dalai Lama and German Chancellor Angela Merkel at her office in September provoked a serious diplomatic rift between Beijing and Berlin.

Since that meeting, China has cancelled a series of high-level exchanges with Germany, including a planned trip to Beijing this month by German Finance Minister Peer Steinbruck.

China sent troops into Tibet in 1950. The Dalai Lama fled Tibet following a failed uprising in the region in 1959 and has not returned to China since, living most of the time in India.

He now travels the world seeking support for his calls for Tibetan autonomy.

Meanwhile in Milan yesterday, the 72-year-old spiritual leader suggested that his successor could be a woman.

'If a woman reveals herself as more useful, the lama could very well be reincarnated in this form,' the 14th Dalai Lama told reporters.

Last week, the Dalai Lama also surprised many when he mooted the possibility of choosing the 15th Dalai Lama himself.

According to centuries of tradition, high-ranking monks in Tibet choose the Dalai Lama's reincarnation after the death of the incumbent.

China recently announced that succeeding generations of Dalai Lamas needed permission from the central government, which is officially atheist, to be reincarnated.

AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE, ASSOCIATED PRESS