That it happened in the middle of the country’s sovereign debt crisis, the fall of the Berlusconi government and a tangle of confusion regarding its ever-morphing feed-in tariff makes it nothing short of astonishing.

Today, however, the Italian solar sector has the feeling of a house the morning after an epic party: worn out and littered with uninvited guests, with the hosts struggling to remember why they threw the party in the first place.

With