Not sure how reliable is this info, but Glassdoor suggests that salary in Milan could be slightly lower than what I would expect from average software engineer in Poland.
I'd imagine that what you get for $25k/yr in Poland is way better than the ROI on $30k/yr in Italy. Depends on the stack though. Most corporate Java people earn peanuts here.
It's also likely that they replaced a well compensated engineering firm responsible for setting up the project with a cheap team handling maintenance.
