He hopes that Italy's head of state president Sergio Mattarella, will ask him to try to form a new, stronger alternative government.

Well, Mr Conte lost his majority in the Senate last week after Italian Aviva, a small party led by the former prime minister Matteo Renzi, left the fragile ruling coalition.

Joining me now from Rome is our correspondent Mark Lowen.

Mark, we've been anticipating this resignation.

We have Geeta because without a majority in the upper house off parliament, which is what happened last week, when when Giuseppe can't they lost it there, it would have been a tortuous process to get any legislation it all through Parliament.

They would have been horse trading on negotiations on any kind of legislative step on DFO.

Facing another vote later on this week on passing a piece of legislation, it was thought that Giuseppe Conti decided to quit before he lost that vote.

Hey has now gone to see the president here in Italy and as a quirk of Italian politics, when the prime minister resigns, he might simply just return following weeks of negotiations to try to build a new, strengthened coalition on.

He will argue that in the midst of a pandemic that has killed more than 85,000 Italians, Onda unleashed the worst economic crisis since the Second World War.

Now is not the time to plunge Italy into fresh elections.

However, If he fails to get the numbers needed to command a parliamentary majority, that task would fall to other political leaders on if all else fails, then, yes, Italy would be facing fresh elections.

Onda.

Who is he going to be reaching out to?

And how will that change the sort of focus off the government, given that the you know, there has been this criticism on the whole handling of the pandemic?

Yeah, he'll be reaching out to various centrist members off the opposition, trying to peel them away, to focus minds, to give them a kind of sense of urgency now to come together in what he will call a government of national salvation, to try to lead Italy through the very difficult next few months.

And there's another factor in all of this Geeta, which is that opinion polls suggest that if elections were to be held now, then a right wing coalition would come into power.

On the biggest party would be the far right league party, led by the firebrand nationalist Matteo Salvini.

And so here, Mr Conte will argue.

And we'll hope that that potential threat would focus enough minds among centrist politicians to kind of rally behind him on decided to form a new coalition led by him.

But nothing is certain in this country, of course, on board it'll be 66 government since the Second World War comes to a close.

But possibly it leads 29th prime minister since the Second World War will simply return as Italy's 29th prime minister since the Second World War.

Martin Lohan in Rome.

Politics always interesting there Thanks so much.