Ok erri, you asked for this... What follows is my understanding of how these taxes work, based on my personal experience buying stuff online for the last few years (long and slightly OT post following).
What Alden mean is that they don't charge whatever the local sales tax rate may be for international orders, since your own country may have different tax rates and that way you don't have to pay sales tax twice.
However, you will still have to pay some form of tax when the package arrives in your own country, plus some other charges that the carrier makes up for the 'inconvenience' of having to get the money from you or something (unless it comes through the standard postal system and you're also lucky; with UPS packages you NEVER get away with it!)
The tax due will be based on the stated value of the item on the shipping forms; the lower the value, the less the tax, so people occasionally mark the value as being less than it is so the recipient has less to pay. There is also an allowance for people to send low value gifts to each other, without the recipient having to pay any duty (to allow for kids getting presents from relatives etc), so people sometimes mark stuff as 'Gift' on the shipping forms.
I think I read somewhere on here that Alden don't like to mark the value of stuff down or mark them as gifts. Steve can get away with 'Gift' marking easier because he's an individual and puts his own name on the packaging (rather than the company name). I'm not sure anyone at Alden would want to do that.
In order for that 'Gift' thing to exempt you from duty there's a limit on the stated value of the package (I think it's about £30 here, although you sometimes get away with a little more). This means that if you mark something as a gift, you often have to also understate its value to get the benefit. If it then gets lost in transit you can't claim back the full value from the carrier, because you only told them it was worth $20 instead of $150 (or whatever).
UPS broke down their invoice for the £51.95 as follows...
Import VAT: £22.96
Duties: £17.99
Brokerage Surcharges: £11
Of which I think the Duties and Brokerage Surcharge must be set amounts since they're such convenient numbers. Bummer.
Based on that, and assuming Alden use UPS to ship to Italy too, I think you'll be looking at a similar situation when yours arrive (although UPS may not charge quite as much over there, and your tax rate may be lower, so it might be a bit cheaper).
If you could get Alden to ship via Global Express Mail (or something other than UPS), there may be a chance that you could get away with paying less just because other services seem to slip through the import duty net more often (here in the UK at least)
Good luck!
Is that some kind of a record? They're in the exact colour shown on the Alden website for the Indy Boot, which is a relief after seeing pictures of so many pumpkin coloured pairs...
Or ask Alden if they have a tips for this kind of subject...
