It's not like they'd have to settle in Naples.

Many people dream of living in Italy but jobs being short, this may be an alternative where you make your own job --and of course, the expectation if you create more jobs and value for Italians.

[addendum]Besides, most likely Italy would be your 'base' and Europe, NAmerica, etc your market --so the poor state of the Italian economy may not enter much into the equation about viability due to local economic climate.

Ndrangheta is not in Naples, organized crimes has different names in different parts of the southern Italy. That unfortunately doesn't change the fact that we have organized crime in Naples (Camorra). And I'm sorry and sad to say it but northern Italy has been reached by organized crime a long time ago (they have different businesses, they work in different ways, but they are there).

Disclaimer: I'm Italian, and I'm from Naples.

Point taken and thanks for the correction. I would have to ask however, would mafia tentacles reach into software based businesses if it's basically a development office?

It is expected they'd do, people collectively seem to believe they'd do, but concretely there hasn't been any large public case. (keyword: public)

Speaking of unemployment. I stumbled upon this animation of unemployment rates in europe some days ago:

http://i.imgur.com/ZR1hNnr.gif

The difference between northern and southern Italy is staggering, it's like they're two entirely different countries...

I couldn't stop looking at the migration of workers from the eastern countries to the western.

Yes, and that's also true regarding organized crime and corruption.

Organized crime has nothing to do with the issues of opening a startup in Italy! What is missing is an ecosystem for startups: no VCs, fair amount of bureaucracy and challenging employment laws. However, you get great engineers, passionate, inventive and hard working for a pricing that is competitive with India. (Sad but true).

I agre with what you say except for the salary comparison with India. Even though salary are low in Italy compared to various other countries, in IT too, according to payscale[1] the average salary of a developer is 340k Rupie per year, that is around 4.7k Euro. The average salary in Italy for IT should be at least 25k-30k Euro. But to be fair it would be interesting to compare it to cost of living, because as Italian I know for sure that IT guys are not paid better than others in Italy, while I have no info about India (it could be that they are pay not too much, but really well compared to other workers and local cost of living).

Having said that, I agree with many others saying that it's not a great idea to go to Italy for startups.. things are moving and are improving compared to 5 or 10 years ago but in no way comparable to other places in UE (let's compare for example Berlin, London or Paris with Milan or Rome...)

[1] http://www.payscale.com/research/IN/Job=Software_Developer/S...

Yeah sure. Go open a startup company in Naples, wait for someone to ask you for /pizzo/ and let's talk again about this.

You know how much is the protection tax in zones controlled by organized crime? 3% of your profit.

You know how much the state takes from your (revenue - expenses)? At least 66%.

Yup, and those two sum up.

It's not State XOR Mafia. It's state AND Mafia. As if state alone was not enough.

Of course they sum up. My point is that there's a much bigger problem in the cost of doing business than the protection tax. About 22 times bigger.

Wait, why is that sad? Good for India. They actually have some great developers, despite the best leaving for the US.