"Italy is enormously vulnerable. It has gone through a whole global recovery with no growth," said Simon Tilford from the Centre for European Reform. "Core inflation is at dangerously low levels. The government has almost no policy ammunition to fight recession."

Italy needs root-and-branch reform but that is by nature contractionary in the short-run. It is viable only with a blast of investment to cushion the shock, says Mr Tilford,  but no such New Deal is on the horizon.

Legally, the EU Fiscal Compact obliges Italy to do the exact opposite: to run budget surpluses large enough to cut its debt ratio by 3.6pc of GDP every year for twenty years. Do you laugh or cry?

"There is a very real risk that Matteo Renzi will come to the conclusion that his only way to hold on to power is to go into the next election on an openly anti-euro platform. People are being very complacent about the political risks," said Mr Tilford.

Indeed. The latest Ipsos MORI survey shows that 48pc of Italians would vote to leave the EU as well as the euro if given a chance.

The rebel Five Star movement of comedian Beppe Grillo has not faded away, and Mr Grillo is still calling for debt default and a restoration of the Italian lira to break out of the German mercantilist grip (as he sees it). His party leads the national polls at 28pc, and looks poised to take Rome in municipal elections next month.

The rising star on the Italian Right, the Northern League's Matteo Salvini, told me at a forum in Pescara that the euro was "a crime against humanity"  - no less - which gives you some idea of where this political debate is going.

The official unemployment rate is 11.4pc. That is deceptively low. The European Commission says a further 12pc have dropped out of the data, three times the average EU for discouraged workers.

The youth jobless rate is 65pc in Calabria, 56pc in Sicily, and 53pc in Campania, despite an exodus of 100,000 a year from the Mezzogiorno - often in the direction of London.

David Fuller's view

This situation is tragic, not least in terms of unemployment. It is also unsustainable, increasingly divisive within Europe, and the single currency is a big part of the problem.