"Ferraris, we can make. Designer clothes, we can produce. Sun, pizza and love, we can provide a lot of," said minister of public functions Renato Brunetta. "It's the public administration that is below par."

Mr Brunetta has become a folk hero in Italy for his vow to modernise government offices and expel idlers among the 3.6 million public workers.

Low productivity, he acknowledges, is not exclusively a problem of the public sector, and the minister is counting on his efforts to nudge private companies into action, too.

"The public has woken up," he said, "it has had an epiphany."

But numbers point to some persistent dozing among Italy's workforce.

Productivity in Italy lags far behind other industrialised nations, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.

Figures show labour productivity in Italy grew less than 0.5% between 2001-06, while in the United States, for example, the rate was over 2% in the same period, and in fellow EU country France it was about 1.5%.

Italians take about six weeks holiday a year, compared to a little over three weeks for workers in the United States and two for those in Japan.

Mr Brunetta insisted that laziness was a mere bad habit, not a fixed national trait. He said: "I don't believe Italians are anthropologically slackers. Italy is a country of small- and mid-sized companies, of self-employment. It is the country of people who take bold risks every day."