Has there ever been a sunnier Italian summer? August was dull, but June was radiant and July scorching. September is proving unseasonably hot. The sunni-ness has not been confined to the weather. At first blush, good news has been piling up on the desk of Italy's finance minister, Tommaso Padoa-Schioppa, ever since he said in June that the state of the public accounts was worse than in 1992 (the year Italy and Britain were forced out of Europe's exchange-rate mechanism).
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