It may be true that many the Chinese names for those lands are the same, or at least very similar, to those used in Ricci's maps; but, suppose you could remove all existing knowledge about what those lands are called in the Chinese language and ask well-educated Chinese speakers to name them base on their Italian (or whatever more appropriate) names, I think people will still come up with very similar names.
The reason is because many foreign words are translated according to how they sound, so phonetic (?) requirements already substantially limit the possible choice of characters.
Since most (every?) character in Chinese has a meaning, I think people generally prefer choosing characters that have neutral to positive meanings, characters that can be put together to form a word or phrase, and/or those that have meanings associated with the actual word being translated.
I think historically there are also "preferred characters" (maybe there is even an unofficial guideline for writers/translators?) when it comes to translating foreign words into Chinese, for example 巴 (bā) is often used for sounds like "ba" or "pa". Some examples of this are the one you have given for Europe (although I think it was likely the "pa" in Europa instead of Europe); Paris (巴黎); and bus (巴士). The same, I think, can be said for most of the characters in the examples you have given.
Perhaps a somewhat related observation is the "divergence" between dialects, where things just don't sound quite right or completely different had they been translated with the same characters. Examples for this would be chocolate (朱古力 in Cantonese and 巧克力 in Mandarin); salad (沙律 in Cantonese and 沙拉 in Mandarin); and very often names for places and people.