The country now stood at a historic moment, he continued, with Italy’s economically weak southern regions poised to receive an amount of investment “unprecedented in recent history”. There had been “years in which Italy often forgot its young people”, he told the crowd in Bari, a city where youth unemployment has at times touched 50 per cent. In late October Italy’s prime minister, Mario Draghi, took to the stage of a technical institute in southern Italy and told the audience of students that successive governments had failed them.
