Hi, interesting thread.
I'm the webmaster of the LFS italian community (
www.lfsic.net).
And since it's really strange, italians don't love LFS.
In Italy there are a lot of "SIM" Portal but they use other SIM (ops, ARCADE) like RFactor or GTR2 and similar.
There are other guys that love Netkar Pro.
For example some months ago Abarth with NKP organized an online Trophy and there was more then 3000 inscriptions.
About LFS there are only 2 big Italian Team, the Playerzone Team (Malcomax, Fiore, Ulisse) and Race4Fun (MaurizioNaselli).
We hope that in future things will change but i think that it will be really difficult.
Italians love ARCADE, actually.