Rome's social world — the Carnivale, the political theater, the performances of loyalty and piety that the Borgia's power demands from everyone inside it. A city of masks is not a metaphor for deception. It is a description of how power maintains itself through the enforced performance of consent: everyone wearing the mask of compliance, the masks so universal that sincerity has become a death sentence.

Only the dead wear honesty because the dead are past the need for the performance. The living have to manage. Ezio moves through Rome's masked city as someone who knows what is underneath every mask and uses that knowledge as operational intelligence.