What torments Jean-Claude Juncker, the president of the European Commission, is not Brexit. A much bigger problem looms to the south. While Westminster look anxiously at Brussels, fearing Europe’s leaders will lose patience with Britain’s fumbling efforts to leave the EU, people in Brussels look anxiously at Rome.

The UK is in reasonable financial health. A bad Brexit would be a severe blow but Britain would survive, eventually recover and carry on buying German cars and French cheese. The slow-burning fuse in the eurozone is Italian debt and the dysfunctional coalition government in Rome which continues to add more kegs of gunpowder on to the pile of explosives.

The question is whether Europeans’ love for their Mediterranean cousin, its glorious cultural landmarks, food, industrial design and fashion flair will be enough to fund the bailout that might be needed if Italy stumbles.

It is in recession after three quarters of declining economic activity. True to its populist credentials, a bizarre government coalition of nationalists and anti-establishment radicals, threw money at voters, cushioning retirees and the unemployed, betting on economic growth that has failed to materialise. The government already owes €2.4 trillion, equivalent to more than 130% of GDP, the highest debt-to-GDP ratio in the EU, excluding Greece.

Worries about shrinking global trade and the risk of a European recession, sent the yield on Italian government debt soaring last year. It has since fallen but the interest rate paid on debt has become the barometer of eurozone financial weather.

Italy’s banks are significant holders of government-issued loans while much of the foreign-held debt is owned by hedge funds and other speculators. A surge in Italy’s cost of borrowing could, some reckon, spark a speculative attack on Italian debt markets, similar to the Greek meltdown between 2010 and 2012. It would be a game with disastrous consequences for Italy’s banks.

The European Central Bank ended the speculative attack on Greece by announcing that it would “do whatever it takes” to support the market. It not only saved Greece but stopped, for the time being, similar speculative short-selling of Italian, Spanish and Portuguese debt. Today, Italy has become the problem but the third-largest economy in the eurozone is no errant child that can be sent to the naughty step.

Italy is really two countries, a collection of northern states with thriving industries. With better infrastructure, more liberal employment laws and access to more sophisticated credit markets, northern Italy could compete with the best and succeed in global markets, even with the burden of the euro’s high value.

Southern Italy is a different story — a world left behind by unemployment, drought, poor education, corruption and the Mafia. It is testimony to Italy’s confusing and desperate politics that Matteo Salvini, the deputy prime minister, has been successful in wooing southern voters to his Lega party.

It was formerly the Northern League, a party that campaigned for northern independence from Rome, and Salvini once condemned southern Italians as “parasites”. But the new League tune is ultra-nationalist and his policy against illegal migrants goes down well in Sicily, the landfall for the leaky boats that bring thousands of Africans across the Mediterranean every year.

Last weekend I watched thousands of tourists enjoying the views in Rome, unperturbed by the financial caldera bubbling beneath the City; young women posed demurely in front of the Colosseum to be photographed. The visitors probably don’t reflect on the landmark’s true purpose: a ghastly pit where dictators pacified a turbulent populace with the entertainment of mass slaughter.

Salvini is pushing the envelope. He hopes that Italy is so important to the eurozone that popular affection (as well as fear of contagion) will force a giant underpinning of its precarious debt mountain. Germany and the other northern eurozone net contributors to EU coffers will knuckle down and approve a budget that includes mutual debt support and guarantees to Italy.

This is a huge gamble; opposition is growing in the Netherlands, Denmark, Austria and Germany. Greece was tough but it would be pocket money compared to an Italian meltdown.

Salvini may find that even 2,000 years of glorious civilisation don’t generate enough love to pay the bill.

