There is still quite an active QL user community as well based out of the qlforum.co.uk including quite a few native Italian speakers.
In terms of the hardware there are different machines around (about six board revisions I believe) and there is also at least on the continent a build with different serial port connectors. It continued to be developed into machines such as the CSR THOR.
There is also a range of improved ROM's as the dongle Andrew refers to was rapidly substituted with larger onboard ROMs. We were lucky enough to get an early pre-release machine under an NDA to develop the adventure writing software on. I often tell the tale of sitting on the train back from Cambridge with a giant Jiffy bag eyeing lots of others with the same unable to talk to each other as we had all just signed the NDA...
I was very impressed with even that early OS as it provided a very professional interface to write to and multitasking support.
That original is long lost but, I have a working one with an SD card based Hard Drive emulator making it quite usable - and one of the Microdrives still works to reliably load and save - once you re-felt the cartridges - DO NOT USE ONE UNTIL YOU DO...
https://youtu.be/bzRc6S7cCHk