Relief in Italy, but the challenges ahead are huge
A coalition government led by Enrico Letta could offer hope after weeks of political turmoil
Investors greeted the news from Rome's highest hill with relief. Italy's two-year borrowing costs fell to their lowest level since the country adopted the euro in 1999.
Like many ordinary Italians, they seemed cautiously buoyed by the fact that Europe's fourth-largest economy was inching towards a new government after two months of unprecedented gridlock.
On paper, there does not seem much to cheer about Tuesday's news. If Enrico Letta does, in coming days, manage to form a grand coalition government with the centre-right and centrists, it has hard to see how that government can be anything other than fragile, fractious and condemned to be relatively short-lived.
Moreover, Silvio Berlusconi, the billionaire former prime minister who has inched ahead in polls during the recent weeks of chaos, will regain his influence on Italian politics through his centre-right party's role in government.
Those are the negatives; they are certainly not negligible. But, after weeks of undignified political scrapping in which Italy's politicians failed to respond to the basic needs of their increasingly indignant citizens, many Italians are not in a fussy mood.
Unemployment is at 11.6 per cent, and among the young it is 37.8 per cent. More than 31,000 firms, mostly small and medium-sized, went bust in the first quarter of this year, the highest figure since 2004. In recent weeks a number of suicides apparently linked to financial despair have hit the headlines.