I really want to learn more about this. Stuff like the city states of Venice, Genoa, Geneva, etc. I want to learn about their naval ventures and their impact in crusades even.
But most especially I really want to learn about them during the Renaissance and Italian Wars. I know virtually nothing about either topic but they sound extremely interesting.
These wars raged on for seemingly have a century and had tons of warfare and players from Scotland to the HRE to Spain. It seemed to dominate European wars for ages, and yet I hardly ever hear anything about it and don’t know anything about it either.
Thoughts?
The Short Oxford History of Italy is your friend here.
You probably want two volumes:
Nowadays most historians pull the start date of the "Renaissance" periodization further back than where the common cultural consciousness would place it (to around 1300, as the Oxford series does) and in the specifics of Italian history, it doesn't matter if you choose to cut it off either immediately before or after the Italian Wars (you can make it work either way) but it does mean you have to make a decision to lump the Italian Wars with either the Renaissance or with the Early Modern period. Again, it works either way, but the reader (you!) is stuck alternatively reading a lot about city-state consolidation (if you lump it with the Renaissance) or reading about long periods of time where nothing interesting happens (if you lump it with the Early Modern Period) which you might not necessarily care about.
What I'm saying is you sound like you're interested in the second half of Italy in the Age of the Renaissance and the first third of Early Modern Italy.