Italy's new prime minister, Mario Monti, faced a demonstration from members of the devolutionist, eurosceptic Northern League in parliament yesterday as he gave a speech on austerity.
Tensions in Italy have been running high, with bullets being sent to the mayor of Rome and the justice minister, and a nail bomb wounding a tax official in the past week.
Italy's political fissures need to be papered over, however, as the country's cost of borrowing is rising again, creating another threat to the survival of the eurozone.
Thursday morning saw some terrifying mathematics from analysts. While the UK quibbles over how much it will pay towards the EU's €200bn loan to the IMF, the scale of the financing gap looks terrifying.
BNY Mellon's Simon Derrick ran through the numbers in a note to clients this morning.
The European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF), the bail out fund, has €275bn left, after committing to support Greece, Ireland and Portugal. The IMF has, possibly, €100bn ready to deploy this year. Add to this the €150-200bn (dependent on who agrees to pay) from the December 9 summit, and the total is between €495-545bn that is deployable in the short term.
Although Athens’s membership of the Eurozone remains a key issue of concern for investors, it is important to note that it is not the only one," Derrick wrote. "In particular, the failure of the region’s authorities to establish an effective firewall around Greece this summer… has meant that Italy, in turn, has become a focus of attention."
By the summer, Italy's debt was more than €1.8tr. Italy and Spain between them are going to need to find nearly €600bn next year, as existing stocks of debt mature. Their costs of borrowing are well above sustainable levels - Italy paid euro era record highs on its five-year debt auction earlier this week.
Writing in the Financial Times, John Paulson, the influential hedge fund investor, said that the amount of money on the table at the moment was far short of levels that might alleviate concerns in the markets, and called for the EU to build a "firewall" to guarantee sovereign debt, modelled on the US' "Temporary Liquidity Guarantee Program' (TLGP), which did the same for financial institutions in the wake of the collapse of Lehman Brothers.
The European Central Bank has remained tight-lipped since the EU summit, and has given no indication that its position on intervention has changed.
The 'Bric' countries - Brazil, Russia, India and China - have also held back, despite hopes in Europe that they would be willing to use their cash surpluses to help shore up the European - and world - economy.
Two issues stand in their way, according to Courtney Rickert, an analyst at Eurasia Group.
"First, they continue to emphasize that any commitment of funding to the eurozone be predicated first and foremost on a credible plan by eurozone leaders to tackle their crisis, a concern that has been reinforced by market weakness this week," she said.
"Second, while many emerging market economies have their fiscal and economic houses in order, it remains politically challenging for these governments to be seen as bailing out rich countries.
Equally worrying is the other side of the debt reduction equation - growth. While reducing the cost of borrowing and pushing through austerity help, the eurozone needs economic growth to escape from its debt trap.
As Mark Otty, managing partner for Europe, Middle East, India and Africa at Ernst & Young said on Thursday morning, launching a bleak winter forecast for the eurozone: "Fundamentally, the real challenge for Europe and the ‘advanced economies’ is growth and whether mature economies can find ways to grow above their historical trend to pay off their debt and learn to live within their means going forward."
Ernst & Young forecasts that the single currency area will enter recession in the first half of 2012, with a marginal recovery in the second half taking the year's aggregate total to 0.1%.