>>201514i honestly think there's a lot of reasons.
one of them as you said is the bad school system, and another i can think of is that everything is dubbed here in italy so people interact with english way less than in countries where that doesn't happen.
as i ranted in this thread over and over again italians are quite normie in their interests and proud of their culture to the extent where they look down on others, both factors make people not get interested in the outside world much, which limits even more their exposure to other languages and english as a means to read manga or watch anime for example.
last but not least i think it's a situation akin (but way less extreme) to japanese people and english.
there's something about how the italian language is structured and its pronunciation that makes it extra hard for italians to be good at english compared to people with other native languages, in fact the ones who score higher in english abilities are closer to it.
in fact, spain has a low english proficiency as well and spanish and italian are very similar languages, the closest to latin.