Well, let's go to the Thought Bubble. Italy was primed for Renaissance for exactly one reason. Money. A society has to be super rich to support artists and elaborate building projects and to feed scholars who translate and comment on thousand-year-old documents. And the Italian city-states were very wealthy for two reasons. First, many city-states were mini-industrial powerhouses, each specializing in a particular industrial product, like Florence made cloth, Milan made arms. Second, the cities of Venice and Genoa got stinking rich from trade.