The Italian referendum is seen as the first populist 'temperature reading' in Europe since Trump's victory in America. Are Italians going to whip up the populist waves or will populists have to tread water for a while after 4 December? An inferno spawned by Grillo’s “daredevil and stubborn barbarians” seems unlikely, but Italy could be slogging away on the economic Purgatory Mount for quite some time to come.