At this very moment, as shown in the screenshot, mii-llm/maestrale-chat-v0.4-beta is ranked 8th right between ChatGPT-4.5 and ChatGPT-4o.
It's likely that for several months, the best Italian speaking LLM has been an open source 7B model created by open source contributors and hardly anyone knew it.
Very interesting security section by @yjernite@lvwerra@reach-vb@dvilasuero & the team replicating R1. Broadly applicable to most open-source models & some to APIs (but APIs have a lot more additional risks because you're not in control of the underlying system):