Young Italians live in a permanent state of precariousness. Three million earn a net monthly salary of between 600 and 800 euro. A further three million earn a net salary of between 800 and 1,000 euro.

Work itself is becoming increasingly unstable. The general trend is hiring people on a temporary basis. A 30-year-old graduate employee earns 6 euro net an hour, or 960 net a month, working full-time, with fixed hours. Many of these temp contracts allow employers to avoid all statutory obligations, including sick leave and paid holidays. It is a widespread abuse, the latest version of Italian informal “underground” economy. People are complaining but not too loud. There is always someone else willing to be exploited, happy to earn something rather than nothing.

The general feeling is that widespread hardship, which was meant to have disappeared for ever in the 1960s, has now returned. Millions of people are struggling to get by and “saving” is not a common word. Everyday conversation focuses on prices and the “disastrous” euro currency. Even the newspapers have been full of it ever since.

Property prices and rents have risen by between 15 and 20 per cent in the past 12 months, and have roughly doubled over the past five years. The greatest increases have occurred in the big cities like Rome or Milan.

The property boom dates back to the end of the 1990s.  Everyone started to invest money into bricks and Italian property prices, which had been stagnant for ages, rose sharply. Mortgages became widely available, interest rates were very low and the rental market was deregulated.

The introduction of the euro in January 2002 was a kind of shock. The Italians had no sense of its value. Being used to carrying a big number of low-value banknotes and to treating coins as basically worthless, they could not understand  the real value of new euro notes and coins. Confusion about the new currency had a big impact on higher prices. Even though salaries were faithfully converted from lire into euros, money for food and general shopping was no longer enough. Nevertheless, Italians carried on spending blithely. Only recently they have realised that the euro is here to stay and that the inflation has slashed the value of their salaries.