Down on the euro

The Dutch aren't the only ones down on the euro. Some anti-euro talk from Italy--Telegraph News 'The euro was supposed to bring security but we cannot live like this'.

In his marbled office overlooking the Piazza Colonna, Roberto Calderoli, Italy's minister of welfare, held up a €20 note and cheerfully tore it in half. "If you like, I will put it through the shredder," he said.

He briefly contemplated setting fire to the note before concluding that this might be against Italian law. There could be no doubt about his feelings towards the euro.

Mr Calderoli's views would have been heresy at the start of 2002, when Italy enthusiastically embraced the single currency as interest rates halved and a boom was ushered in. Yet at the Campo de' Fiori market a few streets away, where the former monk Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake in 1600 for contending that the universe had no centre, hatred of the euro is a new orthodoxy.