“Italy is often the first to do wrong things,” Carlo Rovelli, the Italian theoretical physicist and radical activist, observed when I recently interviewed him.
His country now has its most right-wing government since the fascist era – the first populist coalition to take office in a major eurozone member state. The Five Star Movement and the Northern League secured the approval of President Sergio Mattarella after proposing little-known economics professor Giovanni Tria, rather than the stridently anti-euro Paolo Savona, as finance minister.
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