Ezio Auditore da Firenze, son of Giovanni and Maria. Born into luxury and leisure in 1459, Ezio spent the first 17 years of his life honing his rakish personality and ravishing looks. Women excited him, wine flushed him, and politics bored him. The streets of Florence were his home, and I doubt he had much interest in anything outside its walls. But all that changed in 1476 when, on trumped-up charges of treason, his father and brothers were jailed and sentenced to death. It was then that Ezio learned the truth about his beloved father - that he was an Assassin, one of an elite group of freedom fighters dedicated to preserving and protecting human liberty and the exercise of free-will. Following his father's brutal execution at the hands of a former friend, Ezio went underground and joined the Assassins himself.
Over the next three decades Ezio dedicated himself to two parallel pursuits - to find and kill Rodrigo Borgia, the man most responsible for the deaths of his father and brothers, and to strengthen the Assassin Order. Rodrigo proved to be a challenge, and it took Ezio some twenty years to corner and defang him, by which point our hero's thirst for vengeance had softened. But sparing Rodrigo turned out to be a strange blessing, for it was through the old man's meddling that Ezio caught his first glimpse of The Ones Who Came Before, a mysterious race of people who lived many millennia before recorded human history. Ezio did not understand the messages left behind by this First Civilization, but he never forgot what he saw either. And he scored a pretty cool artifact for his pains too - the Apple of Eden.
Shortly after sparing Rodrigo's life, the Pope's young son Cesare launched an attack on the Auditore family villa, killing Ezio's uncle Mario and stealing the Apple of Eden. That hurt. It stung hard. And it took Ezio another half decade to recover the Apple and erase Cesare from the world. But after that, all was well for the most part. As much peace as an Assassin could expect. Ezio spent the next few years shoring up his resources, training his recruits, and sharpening his skills as a Master and a Mentor.
As Ezio matured in these later years, so did many of his stranger abilities, not least of which was a rare form of extrasensory perception - you know, what we Assassins call "Eagle Sense" in its most robust form. We can't be certain where Eagle Sense comes from, but we've got ideas. Remnants of ancient liaisons between our forebears and The Ones Who Came Before, probably. It's hard to say how, but truth is stranger than fiction. In any case, Eagle Sense was strong with Ezio. I got a little taste myself, in the short time I spent with him, but since my time with him went dark much sooner than yours did, I never got the full experience. But you Desmond, because of the Animus's bleeding effect, your time with Ezio - and with Altaïr - had awakened your latent senses in ways few could have imagined. You can thank Mr. Auditore for that. For doing all his homework, so you don't have to.