This is largely due to the fact that modern Italian is a systematised language that emerged from a literary movement (whose most prominent representative is Alessandro Manzoni) to establish a uniform language for the Italian people. At the time of Italian unification in 1861, only about 2.5% of the population could speak this language.

The language itself was not invented for the purpose: it was the language spoken in Florence, than adopted by the literary movement and than selected as the national language.

It seems like the best tradeoff between information density and understandability actually comes from the deep latin roots of the language