Elena CattaneoItalian researcher Elena Cattaneo has written previously on this site about the lack of transparent, contestable funding for science in Italy.  A new book by Armando Massarenti, Staminalia: Le Cellule Etiche e i Nemici Della Ricerca (Staminalia: Ethical Cells and the Enemies Of Research), picks up on this issue - describing the political and ethical disputes surrounding stem cell research in Italy, and the way science has sometimes been misrepresented.  Cattaneo, reviewing this book in Nature, writes:

Most of the limited public research funds in Italy are distributed through direct negotiation between the national and regional governments (and their administrators) and research institutions or even individual scientists. It is not uncommon to read in newspapers that millions of euros have gone to a research centre or to individual scientists, in the absence of any kind of long-term national strategy, and worse, without any open and public competition for the best proposals.