We are standing in front of La Scala restaurant in Milan, engulfed in heat and a sense of failure, waiting for the limousines which will take us to the airport. Our little group includes bankers from Garanti Securities and Merrill Lynch and three of the four king-pins of Turkey's financial bureaucracy: treasury under-secretary Selcuk Demiralp, central bank governor Gazi Ercel and Istanbul Stock Exchange chairman Osman Birsen. The fourth, Privatization Administration chairman Ugur Bayar, will join us in London, which is our next port of call.
We are on a three-day road show covering Frankfurt, Milan and London - in that order - to convince investors that Turkey has got serious about putting its house in order.
Turkey has an atrocious record for economic discipline. Britain's inflation at 0.5% a year, the lowest in Europe, is something the Turkish economy can manage in three days or at most a week. "You think you have inflation? We have inflation," is the proud boast of the Turk.
So the task facing Demiralp&Co is not an easy one. But our sense of failure is not about that, but something more basic.