Young Italians who leave to find a job sometimes do so at great risk. Joele Leotta was a 20-year-old waiter who had relocated from Lecco, in Lombardy, to the British town of Maidstone, southeast of London. He was kicked and punched to death by a gang of Lithuanian immigrants who accused him of stealing their jobs.

Image Credit... Sarah Mazzetti

Even getting into the job market is challenging. Many simply give up. According to government figures, three million Italians — half of them young — have stopped looking for employment. That’s a third more than the European Union average.

Part of the problem lies in the Italian legal framework. The Biagi law, a well-intended piece of legislation, has made the labor market more flexible. But the system it has created is based on short-term contracts, which undermines the market for stable, long-term jobs.

Internships, supposedly a way for businesses to help young people, have turned out to be a system in which young people help business by providing skilled, poorly paid labor. And then there’s the paperwork: To hire an apprendista, or trainee, an employer must apply to 12 separate offices.

As a result, even those young people with jobs are hurting. The average salary for an Italian born in the 1980s is about €1,000 a month, or about $1,375 — hence the media nickname Generazione Mille Euro. Not the sort of money that will get you a bank loan for your first home.

The previous and current governments — under the prime ministers Mario Monti and Enrico Letta — tried to sort this out. But economic stagnation is making a difficult task harder. Only two economies have grown less than Italy’s between 2001 and 2011. One was Haiti, which continues to suffer from its 2010 earthquake, and the other was Zimbabwe, which continues to suffer from Robert Mugabe.

Silvio Berlusconi, who was Italy’s prime minister for most of that time, had his own views on what young people could do to get ahead. When a 24-year-old woman named Perla Pavoncello asked him in 2008 on national television how she could start a family without a job, Mr. Berlusconi, the country’s illusionist in chief, answered, “You should look to marry a millionaire, like my son, or someone who doesn’t have such problems.” He then added, “With that smile of yours, you could even get away with it.”