Salve!


   How many nuclear physics geniuses have you met? ;) Giuseppe Angilella has been a Koha user for ages, and his early participation spurred a tonne of other folks to adopt before OSILSs were cool. He probably doesn't consider himself a coder, but there are many people that now participate who certainly are. 
    I bet you'd uncover quite a number of Code4Lib type folks at the University of Pisa. A long time ago when animals could talk, and I was an undergraduate, if I were on IRC in search of nerdy discussion at odd hours, the person at the other end usually had a unipi IP. There was a seminar for Koha in Pisa last April that drew about 100 folks.

http://www.bfs.it/index.php?it/22/modulo-eventi/61/koha-open-source-ils-integrated-library-system-seminario

    Since you're in Rome, why don't you check out 

http://catalogo.pusc.it



    And that's just Koha. Surely Gli Azzurri demand cool code for sport. ;)

Cheers,
Brooke