I agree about Italy, the problem from my perspective is that Italy is so complex! Each little city state and lordship is it’s own universe, and collectively they share a culture that is probably an order of magnitude more complicated than most other parts of Europe at that same time. I am just now barely getting to the point where I think I could accurately model some places in Italy (but certainly not all or even most of it).
Like I’ve been to Sienna, Lucca, Florence, Bologna, Milan, and a few smaller towns in Tuscany and Lombardy, I have some of my own photos I can use without having to contend with copyright, have done a fair amount of research on these specific places and have a basic grasp of the history of those towns in 14th-16th Centuries. But if I wanted to develop anything set in those towns, even on a very narrowly focused scale, I’d still have to figure out probably 20-30 other towns and noble families they dealt with (out of hundreds).
That means developing content is a lot of work. And I also think it’s a steep learning curve for a lot of gamers, HEMA folks and people with a casual interest in history to get up to speed sufficiently. Especially for Anglophone readers / gamers. This puts another burden on the author to be able to translate things in such a way that they are accessible and the audience can start to engage with it.
I literally originally chose the Baltic zone as a historical setting back around 2010, because I thought it would be relatively simple compared to Italy. I was right, but it was vastly more complex than I had realized getting into it!
That said, Italy beckons, continually. So let’s call it a stretch goal. I am starting to introduce Italian characters in a couple of our books, and have broad overview descriptions of a few Italian cities in the Baltic II book etc. I’ll keep adding more here and there.