The Pazzi Conspiracy as political theater — the families and the clergy and the merchant-princes performing civic virtue while organizing murder. Florence in 1476 is the game's most formally beautiful setting, the Renaissance city in the brief period before the Medici exile, the wealth visible in every building and the violence invisible in every conversation. Silk and smiles are the costume of the world Ezio is moving through, and the game takes pleasure in the contrast between the aesthetic and the moral.