All roads lead to Rome, the old saying goes. But in Italy’s twenty-first-century strategic ambitions, the roads now converge on a rather different city: Trieste. The city and the India-Middle East-Europe Corridor (IMEC) are pivotal to Italy’s future, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni declared during her keynote address at the Med Dialogue in November.

A month earlier, at the G20 Summit in Brazil, she unveiled an action plan to implement the India-Italy Strategic Partnership signed in 2023. In her remarks, Meloni repeatedly emphasized the unique “peninsular partnership” between India and Italy, tracing it back four millennia as two peninsular nations situated at the crossroads of the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea, respectively.