SELL (Southern European Libraries Link) has released Open Access in Italy: Report 2009.
Here's an excerpt:
In Italy the OA movement has mainly pursued a "bottom up approach." Librarians, IT professionals, senior researchers, early adopters in individual universities and research centres have been actively involved in promoting awareness on OA issues, in implementing repositories, in planning projects, writing policies, developing tools. Initially, the academic institutional hierarchies failed to take any clear stand on the issue.
No specific national funding has been allocated for open access initiatives and in most cases the implementation of the Open Archive was financed with ordinary budget expenditures.
In a limited number of cases (i.e. University of Cagliari, University of Naples Parthenope, University of Sassari, and University of Trieste) the repositories were successfully funded under Regional spending. To date neither the government nor the Ministry of Education and Research have made any recommendations on this matter or provided any funding. Parliament has made no stand on the issue.