  Neutrinos emitted in the carbon, nitrogen, oxygen (CNO) fusion cycle in the
Sun are a sub-dominant, yet crucial component of solar neutrinos whose flux has
not been measured yet. The Borexino experiment at the Laboratori Nazionali del
Gran Sasso (Italy) has a unique opportunity to detect them directly thanks to
the detector's radiopurity and the precise understanding of the detector
backgrounds. We discuss the sensitivity of Borexino to CNO neutrinos, which is
based on the strategies we adopted to constrain the rates of the two most
relevant background sources, pep neutrinos from the solar pp-chain and Bi-210
beta decays originating in the intrinsic contamination of the liquid
scintillator with Pb-210.
  Assuming the CNO flux predicted by the high-metallicity Standard Solar Model
and an exposure of 1000 daysx71.3 t, Borexino has a median sensitivity to CNO
neutrino higher than 3 sigma. With the same hypothesis the expected
experimental uncertainty on the CNO neutrino flux is 23%, provided the
uncertainty on the independent estimate of the Bi-210 interaction rate is 1.5
cpd/100t.
  Finally, we evaluated the expected uncertainty of the C and N abundances and
the expected discrimination significance between the high and low metallicity
Standard Solar Models (HZ and LZ) with future more precise measurement of the
CNO solar neutrino flux.
