It was a stormy end to a storm-tossed Government. The Italian Senate cursed and catcalled its way to the vote of no confidence in Romano Prodi's fractious nine-party coalition, in scenes that saw one veteran carried out on a stretcher when he fainted under the insults of his colleagues, and champagne-popping rightwingers rebuked by the Speaker for treating parliament like a bar.

Many Italians would retort that their extravagantly remunerated politicians treat parliament more like an automatic feeder, a machine for dispensing patronage and privilege that, cascading through regions and provinces, leeches the earnings of taxpayers who pay far too much for much too little. The demise of Italy's unloved 61st postwar Government comes at a time of mounting public shame at the state of the nation, and anger with its political class. People are mortified that Spain's economy has outstripped Italy's. They hold their noses at the garbage fumes rising from Naples, where what politicians now call a crisis is, everyone knows, a problem that has been around for two decades, and at the political fumes from Sicily, where a governor convicted of indirectly assisting the Mafia clings smugly to power. News that Clemente Mastella, the Justice Minister, was under judicial investigation for corruption, along with his wife and 23 close associates, caused less surprise than curiosity as to whether that would bring down the Government.

His subsequent defection gave rise to the confidence vote. The government majority in the Senate hung by a thread throughout its 20-month life, making it vulnerable to blackmail from tiny parties and forcing the dilution of its more promising reforms. Mr Mastella's UDEUR party, with only 1.4 per cent of the national vote, boasted three Senate seats. Defeat was thus virtually certain, which is why Giorgio Napolitano, the ex-communist Italian President, tried to persuade Mr Prodi to resign and try to form a new government instead of putting his support to the test.

To his credit, Mr Prodi replied that democracy required it - that Italians had the right to know where each politician and each of its many parties stood. This may have been his last act before leaving the political stage; it was his finest.

Had Mr Prodi sought to cobble together a new coalition with a few extra Senate seats, that would have been in line with Italy's bad political habit of doing anything to avoid facing the voters. He rejected that course as dishonest; and so should President Napolitano.

The fall of a government in Italy is not straightforward. Elsewhere, it would mean elections, but in Italy it means what, after consultations, the President decides it should mean. Mr Napolitano is known to be against holding elections before ridding Italy of an absurd 2005 election law under which 40 parties won seats in the last elections. He has a point. Silvio Berlusconi's most destructively cynical act as Prime Minister was to tear up a mainly first-past-the-post 1993 law, imposed on the politicians by popular referendum. That law should be reinstated. But it is wishful thinking to suppose that an interim government of technocrats could secure passage of a reform that would eclipse a dozen of the parties now in parliament. Change is more likely through a new referendum, for which sanction already exists. The suspicion must not be allowed to take root that the real agenda is to deny Italians their vote.