Italy considers options for relationship with China, including Belt and Road.

Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni said that good relations with China are possible even without being part of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) deal, as her government weighs abandoning the project. Italy is the only major Western country to have joined China's BRI scheme. Meloni noted that while Italy was the only one of the Group of Seven (G7) rich democracies to have signed the Belt and Road memorandum, it was not the European and Western country with the strongest economic and trade ties with China.