One of the reasons why I left Italy was that Italians talk and argue about politics constantly, as if all you had to do was to cast a vote to some mythical "right party" to fix all the problems at once.

Recently I've been reading the Italian news again, between the plain ansa.it and the opinionated beppegrillo.it, the blog of Beppe Grillo, a controversial standup comedian banned by TV for his political jokes and that later on gained some serious creed by predicting one of the biggest corporate scandals in Europe.
Mr. Grillo's blog is one of the most frequented in the World, now being translated in English and Japanese. But I doubt that many people outside Italy actually follow it as only the Italian version gets between 3000 and 4000 comments per post.. too many to make any sense of them, and frankly most of those comments are just random venting.

With Naples drowning in its own trash for almost half a year now, there is definitely a lot to talk about.
It seems that Italy managed to stop funds to one of our few Nobel Prize scientists, Carlo Rubbia, which is famous for nuclear research, and that has been working on using solar energy. The research was first founded in Italy, but then he had to move to Spain... while the Italian politicians are pushing for Nuclear energy (banned by a referendum 20 years ago) and at the same time burning trash with cancer-facilitating incinerators, that for the occasion have been renamed as "thermo-valuers".

At the root of all this there is culture. Italians are not altruistic at all and are relatively ignorant on how things go about in the rest of the World.
One could argue that the United States of America is also a fairly closed country where news feeds are rather limited (see Anna Miller's 2008 talk on TED).
USA however is a country with so much active research and development. It gathers the brightest minds from all over the World and to some extent it can afford to have the general population not being too concerned or too educated about what happens outside (there goes the Iraq war..).

Back to the Italian situation. I believe the country needs people to simply go to school, study a lot, study scientific matters, develop logical skills and also study abroad.
We need more and more people to stick their necks outside and see on a practical level how things work in the rest of the World. You can't improve much if you have no practical experience of what other countries are doing right.
In the short term however, before the average cultural level grows, we need to start making sure that people that end up with political power are not your "average Luigi".
People need to face that for a special job one needs special people.
A person with power to govern should have, first of all, a basic moral integrity. A stable personality, great intelligence and motivation (aside from getting rich and powerful !).
Not everyone needs to be a physics Nobel Prize, but that would be ideal.

Most of all, politicians mental abilities and economic activities should be constantly monitored. There should be periodical reviews in which politicians' goals and achievements are being shown to the greater population (leaving some room for national security, but not too much).

Basically, I want to know that whoever is taking decisions for me is actually more fit than me, if not, then I should be doing his job !
Politics shouldn't be a career, it should be a service. Granted that experience is a key factor in everything, but experience is also an excuse for people to get lazy and to make huge mistakes on the behalf of millions and millions of people.
Being a politicians is a job of great responsibilities, it ought to employ the brightest minds and put them constantly under scrutiny !

..in the meantime, Italian parliament and senate includes convicted criminals and shady individuals.
Get those out first !