Originally Posted by
irishguy28
Presumably the Italian authorities were able to determine that all passengers on board were EU nationals and therefore decided to allow the flight to use the Schengen arrivals...

Something like this happened to me years ago - arriving in Schengen area on a flight from outside Schengen (but EU member back then). Somehow the ground handling company made a mistake, and the pax (less than 10) did not go through immigration.
I mentioned this to a friend who used to work for the national border guard agency. This resulted in an investigation, and I received a call from the agency as well afterwards.