How on earth can this be changed, though? Culture is extremely resistant to being changed by fiat, and the governance and leadership of Italy isn't up to achieving a national transformation either.
I'm American but also an Italian citizen and have lived there for many years. I have zero hope that Italy will reform in the next few decades unless something incredibly radical like a war breaks out. Cultural apathy and corruption runs far too deep, and anyone who could reform simply leaves for Germany or the UK. Italy is a good place to live if you already have money. If you are a young enterprising person it's hell.
I rented a Fiat last week and the quality is way up from the old days. I gather the headquarters have moved to Holland. Maybe a bit of foreign control is the way forward. I think Lamborghinis are also now reliable since VW took over.
It's quite shocking to see that Italy and Spain will be overtaken in GDP PPP per capita by second-world countries like Czechia, Slovenia and Slovakia in the next ~5 years (all of them went through an economic collapse that set them 15 years back, followed by massive brain drain).
Czechia specifically is not to be underestimated. Czechia has a world class engineering tradition and is generally a fairly well-run country. So "even Czechia" doesn't make much sense to say.
yeah, it kinda makes this even more pessimistic. I recently spoke to someone about the quality his education at the TU Dresden back in the GDR. He wasn't very critical and said he enjoyed a good mechanical engineering education there. This means that even during communism and towards the collapse the good engineering culture persisted. A whole nation and their entire economic system could collapse and the good engineering tradition continues. If we assume that a bad tradition is equally persistent, then we have a problem in souther italy that even the collapse of the economic system and whole state would not necessarily change.
My opinion isn't really scientific, but I think this has primarily to do with the demographic pyramid in Italy and most of Southern Europe, not much with economic development. Kosovo is a clear example that economic development isn't important for IT development and adoption, it's how much youth you have.