What is it with our close friend and neighbour to our north? Its 57 million men and women enjoy one of the highest Gross National Incomes per capita in the world ($31,000). Its men folk have a life expectancy of 77, its women, 83; which must mean something. It is a country that boasts a cultural heritage before which the world bows in homage, an attitude to life and food that is the envy of its European friends. And it has given the world some of the greatest men and women in the history of art, song and literature.
And yet, Italian politicians seem incapable of keeping a government together. There have been more than 60 governments since parliamentary democracy returned to the country after the Second World War.
The latest came to grief last week. In this case, the superstitious are maintaining that years ending with an eight are bad news in Italy. Two examples will suffice. 80 years ago the dictator Benito Mussolini established himself as an absolute dictator and gave himself the title Duce. Thirty years ago, Aldo Moro was murdered. 2008 has just witnessed the fall of Romano Prodi's government.
Those who try to demonstrate a theory using numbers, however, have problems. After all, 2008 is also the 60th anniversary of the New Constitution in the wake of the wreckage of the war and a dictatorship that had led them into it. Mussolini may have made the trains run on time, but nothing compares with the misery he inflicted on his country.
The last government started to lose its grip on power last February, when Mr Prodi lost an important vote on foreign policy but continued in office with a re-formed coalition made up of nine parties. Several of these subsequently threatened to walk out. Since then, Mr Prodi, as so many Italian prime ministers since 1946, when Italians voted out the monarchy in a referendum and voted in the republic, has been walking a tightrope made in Italy.
Matters came to a head last Monday when the Justice Minister Clementa Mastella resigned. He is currently undergoing a corruption probe in which his wife is also involved. It is a measure of the fragility of coalitions that it was this resignation of the leader of a party that has three seats in the Upper House (the Senate) that eventually brought down Mr Prodi, who survived a vote of confidence in the Lower House last Wednesday.
Mr Prodi could have avoided the Senate vote, which he knew he would lose, by resigning; and, indeed, he was advised to do so by the President of Italy, Giorgio Napolitana, once a Communist Party member and sworn into office in May 2006, a month after Mr Prodi won the elections that saw off Silvio Berlusconi.
In fairness to Mr Prodi, he chose not to take the President's advice for good reason. Let those who voted him out be seen to be voting him out.
The outcome to the fall of Mr Prodi's government has seen attempts being made by Mr Napolitana to seek a solution to the crisis. Some clamour for new elections, Mr Berlusconi in the forefront. A possibility being entertained by Mr Napolitana is the formation of a "transitional" government, which would act as a technical (technocratic) administration for a period of time. Central to the crisis of government, however, is an electoral law, passed by Mr Berlusconi, which everybody but the smaller parties seems to agree is in need of reform.
There is little doubt that hydra-headed administrations formed by too many political parties with enough electoral strength to tip the scales at critical moments of governance - and which translates into unwieldy coalitions - contribute to instability. Italian governments are bedevilled by a phenomenon that needs a Herculean effort to dispel this modern monster. In today's context, Hercules may have to take on the form of a prosaic referendum.