However, I heard they were all given English proficiency stage 6 = native speaker without actually being tested.
as Luca said, this is not true. What you say was done by the FAA in USA, but not in Italy.
What is true though, is the fact that ENAC, the italian CAA, was not prepared when the ICAO Language Profienciency came into effect (as if they did not have any time to prepare...
) and so their initial enforcement of LP was to give ICAO level 4 english and level 6 *italian* to all those pilots who had a valid ENAC licence. I would think that they have done the same with ATCOs.
Giving english level 4 LP by default allowed ENAC to buy some more time, and I believe that at this time LP testing issue have been sorted out and things are, on the bureaucratic side, sorted.
Not so on the fluency in english, though... I totally agree, if you keep the conversation on the radio to basic ATC phraseology, Italy is no worse than a lot of other places. But if you digress just a little, then you will surely find people that will not be able to articulate their thoughts properly in english.
But isn't this the same in the cockpit, after all? And isn't this the same in most of the countries where english is not the mother language?
I know, I know... Netherlands, nordic countries... the fact that they don't dub movies in their own language surely helps them to pick up a better english. But this is what we have in Italy.
Ciao, Luca
(who is glad to have parents that made him start to study english at 6 years of age...)