TL;DR

Project Gutenberg is blocked in Italy.

Let’s take a look:

# via Google DNS
$ dig gutenberg.org +noall +answer @8.8.8.8
gutenberg.org.		20851	IN	A	152.19.134.47 

$ dig www.gutenberg.org +noall +answer @8.8.8.8
www.gutenberg.org.	21530	IN	CNAME	gutenberg.org.
gutenberg.org.		21530	IN	A	152.19.134.47


# via an Italian ISP's DNS
$ dig gutenberg.org +noall +answer @"$ITAISP"
gutenberg.org.		900	IN	A	XX.XXX.XX.XX
$ dig www.gutenberg.org +noall +answer @"$ITAISP" | wc -l
0

Needless to say, the address provided back from the Italian ISP DNS is a black hole:

$ nc -w 5 XX.XXX.XX.XX 443
(UNKNOWN) [XX.XXX.XX.XX] 443 (https) : Connection timed out

So why is this? From what I got online, in May 2020 a judge deemed the site to be at the same level as many sites with pirated material. Sure, copyright laws in Italy are different from those in the US, but at least taking a look, folks?!?

The hilariously sad thing is that the only thing needed to go around this “block” is… changing DNS. Yup, if one puts a different global DNS instead of the one provided by the ISP, they can go there again. So… not only that was a sloppy decision based on not giving a f*ck about weighting the pros and cons, but even the execution was sloppy.

This is so depressing.