The present paper deals with storage resources optimization strategies to be adopted in the context of the European Electricity Markets by the Italian Transmission System Operator (TSO), in order to exploit, as much as possible, existing and future storage resources. The state-of-the-art of grid-scale storage technologies deployment in Italy is provided. Then, a critical review of a large set of existing optimization algorithms proposed in literature is presented, with a main focus on pumping hydro optimization approaches, since this is the predominant storage technology available in Italy today. Having not found an approach that perfectly fits with the Italian Transmission System Operator, considering the structure of the electricity markets and the operational planning processes, a new approach is proposed to cope with these requirements.