AHC: Renaissance/Early Modern Kingdom of Italy

Right chaps, your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to come up with a plausible scenario in which the Kingdom of Italy regains its de facto, rather than simply de jure, existence. The rules are:

- POD sometime between 1400 and 1700.
- The Kingdom doesn't have to rule over the whole of the peninsula, just enough for its monarch to call himself King of Italy without everybody laughing.
- Bonus points if the Papacy supports the new Kingdom (not like with the Risorgimento in the 1860s).
- Extra bonus points if the POD is after the end of the Italian Wars.

Any ideas? :)
 
One of the emperors tried to unite the Holy Roman Empire as a single empire (using Barbarossa's method) the Italian States banded together to defend themselves, and after the war one took over either threw political unions, or conquering the others in their weakened condition.
 
Cesare Borgia, Duke of Valentinois and Lorenzo II de Medici, Duke of Urbino are two possible unifiers of Italy. Machiavelli wrote il Principe for the one, and dedicated it to the other. They had the support of their relatives who were on the throne of St. Peter.

Have Alexander VI live a little longer - or even Pius - and Cesare can maybe have a shot at getting Tuscany under his belt - the Romagna was already his.

Just my opinion
 
Visconti unites the northe portion of the peninsula, leaving a reduced papal domain and the Kingdom of Naples as his southern neighbors. Due to butterflies, a civil war is fought in Germany over the title Holy Roman Emperor, and Visconti or his heirs are ceded the title 'king of Iraly' by the victorious side.
 
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