I know what you mean, the inbuilt search is very inflexible, really only of use for search with one key word (or for finding posts by member name, timeframe etc.).
Don't want to teach my granny to suck eggs but you can use google to search the italymag website (and therefore the forums)?
You can do so directly from google homepage by adding "site:www.italymag.co.uk" to the query as per this link:
site:www.italymag.co.uk "(for example) "Permessi in Brindisi"" - Google Search
but you can acheive the same thing directly from Italymag by using the inbuilt google search at the top right of each page on the site (entering your query there negates the need to specify the site, obviously!).