In autumn 2013, the Chinese President Xi Jinping announced the new big infrastructure plan One Belt, One Road (OBOR), known in Italian as Nuova Via della Seta. The program aims to increase and make efficient connections and trade cooperation between China and Europe, diversify the energy supply sources and export Chinese production overcapacity to the West, also consolidating the institutional relations between all the countries involved.

There are two main components in which OBOR consists: the “New Silk Road Economic Belt", the land connection crossing all of Asia reaching Europe, and the “New Maritime Silk Road", the route arriving in the Mediterranean coast along the Southeast Asian, East Africa and Middle East.
The total value of the project exceeds 1,400 billion dollars, involving 65 countries (11 of them crossed by new infrastructure) and 13,000 km of railways. Thanks to OBOR, the potential growth of Chinese trade in 10 years will be around 2,500 billion dollars.

Needless to say how it is capital to participate with a leading role in the development and operation of this program. Italy will have a first level role in OBOR: given its geographic position of “gateway of Europe” to and from the Mediterranean countries, it will in fact be the infrastructural terminal of both routes starting from China and arriving in Europe.

In 2016, the National People's Congress approved the 13th Five-Year Plan of the People's Republic of China, a program with which it reshaped the country's economic development guidelines until 2020. By that year, China aims to double GDP and per capita income of 2010 of its urban and rural population.​

Furthermore, with the new Government and the 19th Congress of the Chinese Communist Party in 2017, the four principles on which the future China will be built have been established. Among these, the promotion of a foreign policy based on new collaboration platforms, on the 360 degree promotion of OBOR and on a new system of international relations based on "mutual respect, equity, justice and mutually beneficial cooperation".

The President of the Italian Republic Sergio Mattarella, on an official visit to China in 2017, made it clear that Italy is prepared to cooperate in OBOR: "The Chinese productive investments find, and will find, in our country a safe destination and an encouraging economic climate".

Also, the Prime Minister Paolo Gentiloni, who went to Beijing in May of the same year, underlined how "from the Italian point of view the idea of this push to relaunch, strengthen and confirm commerce as a driver of the world economy is very important, very convincing and very welcomed".
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The OBOR Italian Institute has been established to answer to the Chinese call.

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