The conversation about graduates leaving Italy is usually conducted in cultural terms: ambition, restlessness, the pull of larger cities. That framing is comfortable because it implies the problem is a mood. The evidence points at something more specific, which is the shape of an Italian career in its first decade.
Starting salaries in Italy are not dramatically out of line with the European average in every sector. What is out of line is the slope. Progression in the first ten years is slower, tied more tightly to tenure than to responsibility, and interrupted by a longer period of fixed term contracts. A graduate comparing two offers is not comparing two numbers. They are comparing two curves, and one of them is visibly flatter.
This also explains a pattern that the cultural account cannot. The people leaving are disproportionately those whose skills price well early, which is exactly the group for whom the flat curve is most costly. If it were restlessness, the departures would be spread more evenly across fields.
The corollary is that the policy instruments most often proposed will not work. Tax incentives for returners help people who have already gone and address the wrong end of the decision. What changes the calculation is a labour market where the second and third job pay materially more than the first, and that depends on firms that grow, compete for staff, and have a reason to bid. Italy's problem is not that its young people are impatient. It is that too few employers are in a position to make them a better offer than the one abroad.