C) POD between 1500 and 1815: By uniting the disparate Italian city-states they turn the energy used against each other into a force for stabilization and expansion. France tries to bully the nascent Italic League only to be beaten off or beaten back repeatedly. With the victory at Lepanto, League forces move into the Balkans themselves, maintaining their hold on Naxos and western Greek Islands but also taking much of OTL Greece, Albania, Macedonia, and Montenegro. Ottoman forces and League armies clash for a century, helping coalesce the nation as its armies fight as one instead of factions. Habsburg and French meddling also create an 'us against the world' mentality, but with the push into both the alliances of the next 3 centuries see Italy expand at least to the Rhone and the Adriatic become an Italian lake. Her navy, led by Genoa and Venice in friendly but serious competition for quality and quantity, takes an early lead in the colonization race. Much of northernmost and southernmost South America along with OTL Madagascar and South Africa are settled by Italians. Several trading stations in India and China are Italian while Formosa and later Sakhalin are settled by them as well. Japan allows a trading post to be built at an offshore location they call, 'Chuokosinmachi' near Kagoshima. By the OTL Napoleonic Wars, Italy is the dominant economic power in Europe and preparing to fight a Franco-Spanish-Austrian alliance with help from the British, Holy Roman Empire, and resurgent Poland. With Catalonia, Provence, Septipolis, the Baeleric Islands, Basque Country, Slovenia, Croatia, Tyrol, Franche-Comte, and several other areas now under direct or <i>de facto</i> Italian control, the stage is set for wars resembling the World Wars of OTL but in the 19th century.
F) POD between 814 and 1100: With the Byzantines providing protection and many of the writings of Roman scholars still available, great libraries begin to coalesce under first a Byzantine protectorate then an independent Italian kingdom out of Benevento. Rome is reborn just before the Great Death but sanitation measures make Italian deaths half to a third that experienced elsewhere. Armed with the knowledge of the Renaissance centuries ahead of schedule, universities come into being and a metallic-type printing press is built no later than 1242 (which arises based on a Marco Polo description of a Korean system in 1239 or so).
Italy becomes the center of an Industrial Revolution by 1500 and interestingly much of the technological development is les by specialized orders of the Catholic Church, whose monks and nuns are specifically allowed by Papal order to have families to encourage development of intellect and technology. Cistercians lead in physics and metallurgy after developing the Bessemer Process, Trappists still evolve and become dominant in Chemistry, Augustinians lead in biology and genetics, Franciscans in liberal arts and political philisophy, etc. Ironically this retards the development of sailing and the Age of Exploration somewhat as silk and spices are cultivated in Italy before much of the rest of Europe recovers from the Great Death. Rome becomes the center of an Empire reborn, ironically challenged mostly in the 16th and 17th centuries by an Iberian Kingdom and its *very* fundamentalist Church of the True Cross (out of Santiago) fueled by New World gold and silver. By 1800 the Iberians are all but exhausted and High Italian, a combination of formal Italian and Latin with some Greek sprinklings, is becoming the language of Europe and world trade.