Italy's M&A market is showing surprising resilience as the structure of the country's economy helps it cope with the volatility on world markets and the bursting of the tech bubble.

M&A bankers still have fond memories from 2000. Giovanni Ortolani, managing director of UBS Warburg, who worked on both Tiscali's acquisition of World Online and the Vodafone sale of its Italian fixed-line unit, Infostrada, to Enel as well as several smaller telecoms deals, remembers it as 'an extraordinary one'. He remains upbeat about the possibilities despite the undoubted change of mood, confident that both these deals would have been successfully completed amid the turbulence of 2001.