A compounding factor is that (actual) Italian men are used to hard to get women, and their efforts are therefore scaled for such challenge. Never have I seen men try so fucking hard to chat up anything within sight than Italians.
I still vividly remember seeing a bunch of them moving through the nightclub crowd, chatting up women one after the other, failing, immediately moving on to the next one, etc.

(One could argue it's the other way around : Italian women have developed a resilience up to the challenge of the insatiable appetites and relentless advances of Italian men)

I went to Italy twice as a teenager with my soccer team. We were in a fresh air market in Herculaneum? I think and nearby traffic was stopped. We were all together, wearing our uniforms with a USA badge and the amount of young women who literally crawled out of stationary vehicles to come talk to us was mind blowing. It was heaven. Spanish steps when i was 16 was the closest thing this country bumpkin had been to heaven at that time in my life.

I was just in Roma last year for two months. I assure you, I had several women hit on me while out and about once I became a common patron of the local bar. I’m 6’, American and only slightly chubby. But that’s all I have going for me in looks, just average. And they could care less that I was American (except one girl). I was still happily (more like blindly) married at the time, so not much happened (divorce was the ex’s ask 3 days after we returned) and was using the bar for good views and language immersion.

You want to know my thoughts on why women there play hard to get: according to a few chats the men are often underemployed or have near zero prospects to be better than above poverty. and according to one woman, a guy she dated just wanted her to cook, clean, and have babies; yep, he just wanted a new mamma with privileges.

So while I was married and my situation unique, I expect woo’ing an Italian woman to be not as hard as you say. I volunteer to go back and test this theory.

Oh, and a slam to my ex. I dedicated 10 years of our much longer marriage to do her family research so she could get her Italian by blood citizenship. That trip was our celebration of obtaining it and to review areas for buying a house. I will now and forever just consider her a Parmesan snorting fake. It was Facebook bragging rights and shit more.

It is often a little depressing for Italian women when they move to Northern Europe, because the lack of people aggressively hitting on them makes them feel unattractive.

They're talking about sex tourism.

In a sense, yeah?

Haha yea. It's pretty great.

"Hey you're sexy"

"Haha thank you but I'm meeting a friend"

Never been to a red-light district?

Bruh italy is just a fucking awesome place.

The problem is that Italy is also an awesome fucking place.

Iunno man, I just wanna play chess. I get my kicks above the waistline, sunshine.

Lots of pedophiles go to rape kids. It's not the thing about transitioning. Although I think the OP was more referring to the general idea of sex tourism, not so much the specifics with Thailand.

So they have lady...girls there?

Sex tourism.