When some of Italy's hospitals (by all accounts rather better equipped than ours) started to collapse under the strain of this new infection last February/March, obviously the Italian government was forced to act. Prior to that I'm sure they could have spent more money on (say) helping to control malaria, but they probably feel much less pressure from their electorate to do that. Similarly when it hit some of ours.
And then it's really not much of a choice: do you let your healthcare system collapse under the strain (and thus become enormously unpopular, at best) or do you do stuff to try and control that. (And sure, make errors while doing that, repeatedly.)
Could Italy (or we) have done different things and avoided some of the restrictive NPIs? Quite likely: an obvious one would be to help people who felt sick to isolate themselves. But the government has barely done anything on that even a year later, and it's still just as important.
The idea of "focused protection" (helping to keep vulnerable people relatively isolated) seems like a good approach until you look at the practicalities. Conveniently we have an idea (though an imperfect one) of who (if infected) is most likely to die (they're groups 1-4 of JCVI's list) and also (about as important) who's most at risk of needing hospital treatment (groups 1-9). Groups 1-9 is lots of people. And even a subset of groups 1-4 (those in care homes) are apparently very hard to keep safe, even if you have significant restrictions outside, so surely it would be a disaster not to have such restrictions.
(I don't intend to defend the government's every action. I disagree with much of their response. But the idea they had some choice in whether to "lock down" last March seems implausible to me.)
In fact, if the transmission isn't suppressed and kept low another variant might put us all at risk again 
