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

That's a good reason to leave.

> 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.

That's why you move to a bigger town, just like people do in the United States. And the province of Venice has, according to Wikipedia 829,418 people.