On Friday 29th July 2016, the third-largest Italian bank Monte dei Paschi di Sienna, will report on it's stress test. It is widely expected to fail and will need a bail-out - or rather a bail-in according to EU rules passed last year. Bail-ins mean that money is confiscated from bond-holders and depositors to bail out the bank. In theory it should only affect depositors with money above 100,000 euros. But as we've seen in Cyprus, the EU seldom follows rules - it simply does what it must to protect exposure to the German and French banks for whom the EU is really run, and will break any amount of rules in the process.
Earlier this year the town of Vicenza, underwent a devastating bail-in of a small local bank, Banca Popolare di Vicenza earlier this year. It devastated all local townspeople who had dealings with it. But Monte dei Paschi di Sienna is way bigger.
What can you do to protect yourself? Get your money out of the banks now. Problems with Monte dei Paschi di Sienna won't be confined to that one bank because unlike the Vicenza bank, it is huge - all other Italian banks are exposed to it, as are some German and French banks (notably Deutsche Bank).
People have been so focused on Brexit, but that was merely an orderly vote to leave the EU by a country that controls it's own currency and has a healthy economy and low unemployment. A banking crash in Italy is a whole other thing - this has the potential to be worse than Lehman Brothers.
Lehman Brothers came out of the blue, no-one was expecting it. You have some warning about the Italian banking problem - Italians reading this should act to protect themselves.