Italy’s digitisation minister has big goals and a big budget

THE HOMELANDEUTVEU of Galileo and Marconi has proved unexpectedly resistant to digital technology. Many Italians adopted mobile phones while they were still a rarity in other countries, including America. Yet the share who regularly use the internet is no higher than in Turkey.That partly reflects Italy’s elderly population: it has the ’s highest median age. But Riccardo Luna, formerly his country’s representative in the European Commission’s Digital Champions Expert Group, says other factors have also played a role. For eight of the ten years from 2001 to 2011, Italy’s prime minister was Silvio Berlusconi, a magnate for whom the internet represented a commercial danger. Telecom Italia, the country’s dominant land line operator, had an interest in slowing the introduction of broadband to maintain the value of its main asset, a copper cable network. In 2020 the share of Italian adults who had used the internet in the previous three months was just 78%—the second-lowest in the .