There are few better holiday destinations for bankers to contemplate their industry while relaxing poolside with their BlackBerries than Tuscany, the birthplace of modern finance. Five years on from the collapse of Lehman Brothers, this beautiful part of the world offers plenty of sobering parallels and pointers for the future.

First, and most obviously, the sheer number of banks in Italy (there are nearly 800 of them) is a telling indication of the overcapacity still embedded in the European banking sector and a worrying sign of the rationalisation still to come. No medieval town is too small to give its name to a bank, and no hilltop village too remote to house at least two competing branches. (This gives you pause to wonder about the Archbishop of Canterbury's suggestion that RBS might be broken up into a series of regional banks.)