KEY POINTS:
The children learning to swim at the pool near Via Casilina, in a working-class suburb of Rome, could not ask for better qualified instructors.
One is a literature graduate with a Masters in Communications from Brussels; another, Antonio di Martino, is an aerospace engineer.
Di Martino, 30, still
has to finish his degree, but with a 1-year-old baby and another child on the way, and afternoons and evenings working at the pool to bring in ¬1100 a month ($2220), something had to give.
"Some of the pressure to graduate also slipped away when I saw one friend get his degree and then only earn ¬500 a month at an Italian space firm and another get ¬800 a month at the European Space Agency," said Di Martino, bouncing his son on his knee as his partner, Mattia, rushes out the door to her teaching job, which pays ¬1200 a month.
"My parents bought me my flat, making me one of the lucky ones since prices are crazy and I would never get a mortgage," he said. "I spent two years of savings on doing up the bathroom and now I worry about my son. One problem, one unforeseen expense and things get serious."
Price checking in supermarkets was the norm - "something my mother never did".
And the family thinks hard before travelling. "With petrol and tolls, even a trip to my parents in southern Italy now costs ¬100."
Di Martino is part of a new phenomenon sweeping Europe. As he spoke, Africa Garcia Arias, 32, was nearing the end of a 45-hour week in a busy Madrid hospital. Six months pregnant, Arias will scale back her working week in the coming month. But, though she is exhausted, this is hardly much relief. Her salary of ¬1600 will drop to ¬1000 a month.
On Friday night, Lorenzo, 35, was on a train heading to work a nightshift for a major American sales website's Berlin branch. He trained as a historian and a photographer.
"The pay is just about OK - ¬2700 a month for a 40-hour week - but it is hardly the job I dreamed of doing."
And in Paris, Nathalie, 24, was sitting in a friend's tiny flat in the rundown 20th arrondissement, the poorest district of the city, having finished another month of unpaid "work experience" for a publishing company. Tomorrow she will be at the second home of her parents in Brittany to sit in the sun, read and swim.
"I look at how they live, and how they lived when they were my age or a few years older, and I realise that I will never have any of that."
With inflation soaring, property prices sky high, wages relatively static, labour markets gridlocked and sluggish or slowing economies, Nathalie, Lorenzo, Arias and Di Martino are among tens of millions of Europeans raised to expect that their degrees and diplomas will assure them a relatively high quality of life who are now realising the world has changed.
The disappointment is a shock with big political, social, cultural, even demographic consequences. "I am angry. I know a lot of people in the same situation and our qualifications are not being rewarded," said Arias.
In Spain they are known from their pay as the "mileuristas" (thousand euro-ers). In France they are the "baby losers" - a term coined by sociologist Louis Chauvel to contrast them with "baby boomers".
Chauvel, a sociologist at the National Foundation for Political Science, says for the first time in recent history a generation of French citizens aged between 20 and 40 can expect a lower standard of living than the one before.
"They have an average of three years' more education than their parents, a worse job and a lower standard of living.
"Some talk of a war between the generations, but that's a little simplistic. It is more that the system means the haves are keeping what they have and no one is helping the have-nots," said Chauvel.
"The big determinant in France now of success is not your educational level but the wealth of your parents, if they can support you during your 20s as you fight your way into a closed employment market."
Chauvel says the problem is particularly bad in Latin countries where parents are expected to support their children much longer.
In Spain, even during the boom years when Spanish growth outstripped the rest of the European Union, the "mileuristas" found themselves unable to afford their own homes. But now with the Spanish economy crashing, prospects are grim.
Josep Comajuncosa, a macroeconomist in Barcelona, said the downturn will not solve the basic problem. "What is needed is a model of growth based on greater productivity and new industries - primarily service-based like IT, financial services and new technology, which can raise salaries," he said.
"I haven't been away for two years," said Aurel Thurn, 38, who works for an art gallery in Berlin and has top-level qualifications, 10 years of experience and speaks four languages fluently.
"I have enough money for my rent, my telephone and food. But that's it."
Many feel that Germany's middle class has not benefited from the nation's economic recovery.
The result has been political pressure, with mounting trade union activism and industrial action aimed at securing higher wages and enhanced social security benefits as well as lower taxes for average earners and higher taxes on the rich. Germany's political parties have reacted by boosting public spending and are considering tax cuts.
"There is a political swing towards what were once considered the ideas of the political left such as minimum wages, benefits and so on," said Holgar Schaefer, labour economist at the Cologne Institute of Economics.
But it may be that, instead of the demise of the European class, we are merely witnessing its evolution.
Daniel Gros, of the Centre for European Policy Studies in Brussels, said the middle classes were splintering.
Analysts also say the "hardship of the middle classes is relative - the European Commission estimates 16 million people in the EU are at risk of poverty".
"The decline in standards of living for young middle-class people is pretty moderate when compared with the situation of their counterparts in totally marginalised communities such as the poor French suburbs," said Professor Ian Begg of the London School of Economics.
"There is a trend towards a certain classlessness and some win and some lose. Jobs that were previously passports to stable middle-class incomes and wealth no longer are. And those who lose out most shout loudest."
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