Alongside its sky high government debt, another issue that is a cause of worry around Italy's finances is its banking sector. After a full blown crisis almost emerged in 2016, Italy has managed to iron out some of the worst of the financial sector's problems.
But debt levels remain high, and most banks have a large proportion of toxic loans — that they don't expect customers will ultimately pay back — on their books. So whenever Italy's economy starts to look shaky, bank stocks tend to suffer.
"Despite improvements over the past few years, the banking sector is still too weak to withstand the impact of much higher bond yields for long," Capital Economics warned in a note on Wednesday.
That was in evidence on Friday when some individual Italian banking shares lost more than 10% of their value.
The chart above shows the Italian banking share index, which aggregates the performance of Italy's major lenders. It has dropped more than 11% since the start of last week.