@Teakettletrio
I think part of the problem is expecting “main courses” to have what a British person would class as a variety of vegetables.
Italians usually prefer “contorni” because their meals tend to be compartmentalised. They wouldn’t put a load of vegetables on the same plate as meat or fish say. They really wouldn’t want it touching.
Their dishes generally, although there are exceptions, prefer to focus on a singular vegetable at a time to be able to taste its flavour, so in traditional food you just won’t find a mish mash of “veggies”, rather different separate vegetables sides.
It’s Autumn now, so the vegetable dishes are completely different to summer vegetables. No one eats courgette flowers or fresh tomatoes after the summer ends if they want the best. We’re now onto pumpkins and chestnuts and such like. Italian food is seasonal, and there’s more cooking, building up of flavour etc in the autumn/ winter dishes and this means more contamination from meat produce.
I am Italian and live in Italy. There are a wide variety of vegetable dishes available, but they are made to cater for the local population who love eating vegetables, rather than being for ethical vegetarians. This means that in general they won’t compromise on flavour and suggest to alter a traditional vegetable based dish because it has some cheese in it or has been exposed to meat sources during its preparation, or has an added anchovy etc and would rather not serve the dish at all than serve it in a sub standard fashion. It may come across as food snobbery, but it’s cultural love of their cuisine in the same way many British people would prefer to not see their language butchered or dumbed down.
You can obviously say you don’t eat meat or fish, but if you are strictly vegetarian you would also have to specify that you don’t eat cheese either seeing as the majority of cheeses won’t be ok.
Basically it’s not something a generic Italian restaurant has to deal with. It’s really only US/UK tourists that have a number of ethical vegetarians. In larger cities and major tourist spots there will be restaurants which market for and make a name for themselves, and focus on creating delicious strictly vegetarian and vegan food, but not so much in local towns.