Somehow, I felt that behind the difficulty to disinflate the economy until the mid-1990s and the dismal growth performance following the establishment of the monetary union there were common factors, most notably the very low productivity growth in the (protected and inefficient) service sector of the Italian economy.
This made it very difficult to disinflate in the former period, as the increases in nominal wages that were matching the rise in productivity in the manufacturing sector became the benchmark for a service sector lacking the ability to produce similar productivity gains, with higher costs for the same manufacturing sector.