  Realistic nuclear potentials, derived within chiral perturbation theory, are
a major breakthrough in modern nuclear structure theory, since they provide a
direct link between nuclear physics and its underlying theory, namely the QCD.
As a matter of fact, chiral potentials are tailored on the low-energy regime of
nuclear structure physics, and chiral perturbation theory provides on the same
footing two-nucleon forces as well as many-body ones. This feature fits well
with modern advances in ab-initio methods and realistic shell-model. Here, we
will review recent nuclear structure calculations, based on realistic chiral
potentials, for both finite nuclei and infinite nuclear matter.
