I've loaded the database for Italy and although there are regions, there are no cities so unfortunately Google Maps doesn't work. If the Italy database isn't going to be updated is there any way that I can do a limited update myself that will load into osclass and create working Google Maps? Even if I could add say 20 cities per region it would be a great help for my application.

Not sure how it relates to google maps?
Not all regions has cities, really depend on source if it had them or no, anyway you can update location structure in oc-admin

None of the regions in the osclass Italy database contain cities which of course is not correct.

If you add cities yourself in the osclass locations dashboard then they are not picked up by Google Maps and the item's Google Maps position doesn't display on the item page. In fact there's no Google Map at all.

I've checked other country databases in the SQL tables and they have GPS coordinates and a couple of other codes that I don't understand and cities are numbered, so without having more information on the database structure I can't update the Italy database myself in a way that works with the Google Maps API.

Is there a site or source from which osclass obtains its country databases?

Go there.
http://download.geonames.org/export/zip/

Check italy data.
At bottom of page, you will find explanation what each column means.
If you can clearly identify what is region and what is city (by providing administrative codes), we can review Italy database.

OK, I've done it myself. The official osclass Italy database was structured incorrectly and contained several typing and syntax errors all of which I've corrected. I've now created a new version which works perfectly for me in Osclass 8 with Sigma theme and is uploadable via data import.

If you let me know how I can get it to you (it's only 4.7 mb so I could even email it as an attachment) you can check it out and put it into your library as a general download. I'm amazed to find that it contains around 40000 locations!

Now if someone could tell me how to transfer the relevant sections out of the gui item.php into the standard sigma item.php to get the fancy image viewing function I reckon we'd be about evens :-)

Nice to hear