At the end of XIII century it took 8 years for Marco Polo to get to and from China, nowadays, instead, 8 seconds through the Internet are enough.

Starting from this idea, on September the 4^th the Italian Government signed an agreement with the e-commerce Chinese giant Alibaba, in order to promote the Italian gastronomy delights and to fight harder against the counterfeiting of PDO and PGI products on the online market, especially Asian.

In fact, Alibaba is the most important Chinese industrial group specialized in B2B trade that can be found on the Internet: in other words, it is a web site that connects wholesalers, especially Chinese, with businessmen from around the world.

The agreement just signed, which allows Italian businessmen to reach more than 430 million new consumers, represents an extraordinary achievement, both in terms of protection and fight against fakes, and in terms of the promotion of Made in Italy.

Under the first aspect it is legitimate to talk about step forward because the agreement just signed follows a first partnership, the “Memorandum of Understanding” of June 2014, and it expands greatly the protections provided for the Italian gastronomy delights.

First of all, it has extended the area of applicability from the only portal B2B, reserved for companies, to the B2C one, so as to ensure millions of people the real opportunity to purchase the gastronomy delights actually produced in Italy.

Secondly, Italy is the first, and for now the only, country in the world to see guaranteed on the e-commerce platform its PDO and PGI products with the same protection against forgery usually reserved for commercial brands.

In these terms, the agreement, which is aimed at a joint fight against forgery and already experimentally launched in the last year, has achieved significant results by preventing the placing on the online market and, consequently, the sale of a large amount of fakes.

It has thus avoided, for example, the monthly sale of 99,000 tons of fake Parmesan or 13 million bottles of Prosecco not coming from Veneto.

Furthermore, to facilitate the detection of counterfeits, the agreement provides that the Italian Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Forestry constitutes an operational Task Force of the “Inspectorate fraud crackdown”, tasked with daily monitoring for any announcements of counterfeit products and report them to Alibaba. In case of signalling, announcements are removed within 3 days and sellers are informed that they are usurping the Italian geographical indications.

Finally, on the grounds of the agreement recently signed, the Chinese industrial giant is also committed to promoting the educational moments of business owners and consumers about the importance of food geographical indications.

As already said, however, the agreement does not only concern the protection of the Italian gastronomy delights, but also provides an important step for the promotion of the same products on the web site.

A first result came out just a few days after the signing.

As announced last April by Jack Ma (founder of Alibaba) when in Verona for the Vinitaly, on September the 9^th the first “Tmall 9.9 Global Wine & Spirits Festival” was organized; that’s to say, the day dedicated to wine, due to the Chinese pronunciation of “Jiu Jiu” (whose sound recalls both the word “wine” and the word “nine”), during which Italy was the second best represented country after France with 50 different wineries and more than 500 wine labels (compared to only 2 wineries mentioned on the web site until April 2016).

The Festival, intended to promote the popularity among Chinese consumers of the wines and spirits imported, has been characterized, over 24 hours, by a series of innovative online marketing campaigns, as the live auction for the rarest labels with limited availability, and more: in nearly 500 Chinese pubs participating in the initiative, free tasting and other services were offered in order to grant the different brand maximum visibility and the opportunity of a real contact with consumers.

From the results of the Festival it is possible to realize the real potential of the Chinese e-commerce for the Made in Italy: as a matter of fact, until a few months ago the share of the Chinese market for Italian wine was less than 6%, while now, from the moment of the announcement made in the spring at Vinitaly, the Italian wineries have seen Chinese imports increased by more than 40%, for a total value of one billion euros.

These data shows that the Chinese e-commerce is an exciting opportunity not only for Italian wine, but, in general, for all the Italian gastronomy delights, which are able to penetrate the market not only because of their intrinsic value, but also because of the image of the country, considered as a model of agriculture based on biodiversity.

But now it’s time for Italian entrepreneurs to take the next step and so, following the path opened by the Government, some Italian wineries in partnership with Unicredit and Intesa Sanpaolo are giving life to the “E-Marco Polo” project.

This project has the ultimate goal of creating a portal B2C that would allow Italian small and medium businesses an easy, fast and cost-effective access to the Chinese online market through the management and the promotion of “Vetrina Italia” on Tmall Global (extension of the portal Tmall B2C of the Alibaba Group).

The Silk Road, although on Internet, is reopened. We must have the courage to take it.