The post office knows who you are sending letters to. They have to know because they have to deliver it. They do not know the content of the letter. They also dont know if the letter will be passed along by the receiver to a different destination.

Your ISP knows you are sending traffic to a VPN but not where they are sending it to. The VPN knows where you are sending traffic to but not the content of that traffic. So if you browse a website that only serves pirated content, then they knows you are consuming pirated media but not which media.

If the law requires the VPN to report any and all traffic to blacklisted sights then a "no logs policy" would breach that law.

However to make this law work, Italy would have to ban all VPNs and http proxy services outside of Italy. Italy would have to force pretty mutch the whole world to follow this law for it to work.

What happens if you run a tiny server on AWS in the USA to proxy your private traffic. Unless AWS USA is watching all traffic to see if it complies with Italian law there is no way to enforce it.

If it truly keeps no logs, then it cannot tell what you are doing. But otherwise, a VPN provider can indeed tell what you're doing because you are only shifting the trust from your internet service provider to your VPN provider. I would highly recommend something like IVPN or Mullvad and only pay for it in Monero. That way, even if logs are kept, you are just a number account to them and they do not have a name for you.

Yes, any VPN provider will see what's in your traffic, no way around that...ever...no matter who you choose

however not all VPN providers will keep a record of your traffic, so it may only exists briefly in their servers as it passes through and then it's gone. This is how companies like mullvad operate. Even if the cops come with a warrant, there will be no evidence because nothing is saved.

Depends on your definition of "what", and the server you're talking to, and what DNS you're using, and your VPN provider, and maybe the phase of the moon.

So, pretty much the best-case scenario is when the site works via https, and the server supports "encrypted client hello" (ech), and your browser has ech enabled. In this case your VPN provider can see that you've sent something to the IP (one IP can host multiple websites with different domains).

Https and no ech = can see IP, can see the domain.

Http = can see everything (thankfully, quite rare now).

Some VPN providers may as well use their own DNS, then they can see what domains you've talked to regardless of ech (afaik, since domain lookup should happen before client hello, since you're basically looking up whom to "greet")

Some providers are Facebook with fake mustache and will shamelessly try to mitm you

When you visit sites with https then the traffic is encrypted. They still see what sites you are visiting.

For sure.

Yes

Yes. Pay anonymously and change accounts every few months.

If possible, share your VPN creds with others, such as installing it as a whole-house VPN for you and a neighbor. The more mixing, the better.