Italy is a place with many talents, but that's not enough, for two reasons at least.

First: why should I stay here when people have no money to pay me for my talent?

Second: let's say that I want to start a startup, it's extremely hard to find talented people near you. I live in a relatively small city, which with the province makes about 500k persons I think, and I know nobody who knows rails well. And we're talking about rails, what about Clojure, Objective c, etc.

Maybe there are good people out there, but for cultural reasons you don't even know they exist.