Europe close: Stocks start week moving higher

Investors across the Continent continued to push stocks higher at the start of the week, despite some analysts' doubts regarding the sustainability of recent gains in the stock market.

Helping to buoy sentiment, Italy and Spain made new inroads in containing the Covid-19 outbreak over the weekend.

Yet despite stocks' recent rally to four-week highs, Michael Hewson at CMC Markets UK said it was "absurd" to believe that share prices had already put in a bottom "given that by the end of this week, we could well see the number of Americans who are out of work in the last four weeks rise to over 20m."

"Furthermore, despite some evidence that we are seeing a “flattening of the curve” in terms of cases and deaths, the prospect of an early end to the current status of lockdown still seems some way off, with French President Emmanuel Macron extending the lockdown in France until May 11th, with the added kicker that pubs and restaurants won’t reopen much before July," Hewson added.

By the end of trading, the benchmark Stoxx 600 was 0.64% higher to 333.91, alongside a 1.25% advance for the German Dax to 10,696.56, although the FTSE Mibtel slipped 0.36% to 17,558.43.

Front month Brent crude oil on the other hand were down 5.48% at $30.09 a barrel on the ICE.

On Sunday, Italy's civil protection service reported an increase of just 1,363 in the total number of people that were currently infected with the virus to reach 103,616.

Meanwhile, in Spain, the number of new infections slowed from 3,477 on Monday to 3,045 for Tuesday.

No major economic reports were released on the Continent on Tuesday.