Over the past few weeks, Italy has been back at the heart of events.

THE firing on May 24 of Ettore Gotti Tedeschi, the president of the Vatican Bank, because of a failure to “promote transparency”, must have sent a frisson of fear through the upper echelons of the Roman Curia, coming as it did three decades after another scandal involving the same institution.

THE Vatican defended the late archbishop Paul Marcinkus, the head of the Vatican Bank whose tenure was marred by financial scandal, from reports yesterday that he ordered the killing of a 15-year-old girl in 1983.

Four people were indicted today for the murder of Italian financier Roberto Calvi, a banker with close ties to the Vatican whose body was found hanging under a London bridge in 1982, reports said.