The importance of an Italy-based MW is paramount. Along with Chile and Portugal, Italy was the only country in the leading wine exporter (almost overlaps with largest producers) who did not have a resident MW. Moreover, the importance of Italy in the wine world is hard to understate.
Italy now has an ambassador that can connect Italy to the world with an authoritative voice. Whatever you may think about the MW title, it is revered worldwide. It also generated a good amount of publicity within Italy. This may help to shed some light to a fundamentally misunderstood (locally) qualification.
There are many reasons, Italy had to wait this long. One can argue the curriculum favours nonproducing countries as France, Spain and Italy only have a fraction of all MWs. There is some truth in that as if you walk in any wine shop (or supermarket) and you find an abundance of local wine happening to be very cheap. Clearly this does not leave almost any room for foreign wines.
This has a non-secondary side effect in the sense that you don’t taste any wines of the world (this includes France except for Champagne) up until you embark in the WSET sequence. Adding to that, Italy does not have many worldwide relevant wines in the WSET context: possibly Nebbiolo, Sangiovese and a few others. Hence any Italian must find a reliable supply of foreign wines at all price points. Someone in the UK needs to walk in Waitrose or even Tesco to find all the material.
Adding to this and speaking from experience, it is a lot easier to look at the wine world through the IMW lenses once you lived in the UK for a while. Despite the syllabus being ample and global, its core is deeply rooted in the British way (nothing wrong with that in my opinion!).
Finally, the ability to speak and write in English in a concise and authoritative manner is very rare to come across in Italy. First and foremost because English is poorly taught at school and secondly because Italian is a beautiful language but very verbose. Summaries are not an Italian specialty. (As you can probably guess from my write-up!)
There are two more Italian MWs waiting in the wings and 3 years ago Italians were the largest student group at the Institute. Let’s see what the future bring and well done Gabriele Gorelli MW!
P.S. There are 2 MW with an Italian passport but neither ever lived in Italy.