Italy's a wonderful place, but it's not really a showcase for Big Government.
For example, I ran a test in 1980: I sent my parents a postcard from downtown Rome on Tuesday and another postcard from Vatican City, a separate country about a mile away, on Wednesday. The Vatican City postcard arrived home about three weeks before the postcard I had entrusted to the Italian government for handling.
It's not exactly a secret that the Italians are lousy at government. They'll tell you that. In fact, quite a bit of the motivation for the creation of the Euro currency was that the Italians wanted to outsource management of their money supply to the Germans.