Well my dad has one of these and it does suffer from typical italian build issues.
He got it from new (99) and the dash wasn't put together properly so since then there has been a piece of fabric hanging in front of his speedo, which he couldn't be bothered to fix.
Not long after he got it one of the banks of switches collapsed into the dash, and again he never got it fixed.
His car suffered from the common fiat group problem of a failure in the alarm/siren unit and just started emitting a high pitch shriek at 4:30am that didn't stop so he had to drive it to the middle of nowhere and wait for the dealer to open.
More recently the fuel tank split, its made of a dodgy plastic and all the repair attempts failed. A new tank is £600+ from Fiat and no-one makes a pattern part for it. We got a scrap one for £60 but obviously theres a chance it could go again since the newest cars are 9 years old now.
My dad puts up with it though because he thinks it is the best car he has driven, and he could easily afford a new car (he was looking at an R8 for a while) so he isn't just making do; Says it goes like a gocart.
To my mind though it doesn't feel as fast when he boots it as its figures would suggest - its supposed to hit 60 in 6.3 (20v turbo) but it doesn't feel all that much faster than my 156 v6 (7.1 to 60). I don't know if that is to do with how they measure the 0-60s or if my car has been chipped or if his is slightly broken.
Oh and since new the ride has been very harsh and creaky.