I'll post these first, since
Nettuno is a special case both in reality and in OOTP. It's a small coastal city in Lazio, about 60 km from Roma. "Nettuno" is the Italian name for the Greek god Neptune; it's next to Anzio, and is thought to be the modern site of the old famous Roman port Antium. If you are into WWII history or have ancestors that fought for the Allies you'll remember
Anzio as the landing site for Operation Shingle; Nettuno is the site of the
Sicily-Rome American Cemetery, where GIs that died invading Salerno, Sicily, and Anzio/Nettuno are buried.
Although American soldiers were (and are) stationed all over in Italia, for whatever reason, the people of Nettuno fell completely in love with baseball. Oddly enough, it's so popular that there are multiple baseball clubs in the city that apparently have often squabbled/competed, to the point that there was no Nettuno team in Serie A1 at all this year; the successor to one of the old squads is in Serie A2. I didn't quite understand all the machinations, but for present purposes I used the "new"
Nettuno Baseball Club 1945 for Nettuno's entry. Unlike all the other teams, I didn't use their football team nickname. "Mareggiata" is Italian for "stormy sea", so I picked that for Neptune's ball team. It's close enough to Roma that I think it would function as the capitol's second team. And I gave them road grays because I imagined they would have had road grays when the GIs started them playing baseball and would have resisted switching to white as the football-based clubs.
I haven't seen it yet, but there is a
documentary film about Nettuno and its sport, and if you can find a copy,
Baseballissimo by Dave Bidini is a fun read about his experiences playing in the lower levels of Italian baseball.
