Where in the world does the average citizen spend just two hours a week online? An isolated backwater, perhaps? Or maybe netizen figures from a far-off land trapped in a time bubble of its own desiring? Well, close. This bastion of digital indifference is Italy, one of our closest neighbours, a super-rich G7 nation and homeland to the inventors of the telephone and radio.
Some think this technophobia is a good thing, preserving the Italy of laid-back “click with friends and family, not a mouse” yore. Tourists for one find the low-tech lifestyle enchanting.
Others feel it has put the country at a huge disadvantage, flinging it far over the wrong side of the digital divide where Italy will, in economic terms at least, continue to languish as the ageing, increasingly impoverished sick man of Europe.

(dal Guardian di una settimana fa)