A sacra rappresentazione was not staged by professionals for a paying public in the way a modern play is. It was mounted by a confraternity, a lay religious company organized around a parish, a trade or, distinctively in Florence, around the education of boys and young men, who took the acting roles themselves as part of the company's devotional life. A single play dramatized one self contained episode, the Annunciation, a saint's martyrdom, a miracle worked by the Virgin, timed to that subject's own feast day rather than joined with other episodes into one continuous city wide cycle covering the whole of salvation history the way the English mystery cycles were. A Florentine audience did not sit through one long day of biblical history; it returned across the calendar for one story at a time.
What set Florentine productions apart was their machinery. Confraternities built and operated elaborate devices called ingegni, rigs of ropes, pulleys and platforms capable of lifting an actor into a church's own rafters to represent an angel's flight or Christ's ascension, engineering ambitious enough that some of the same craftsmen and machinists later worked on civic festival design more broadly. The plays open with an angel's annunzio, an introductory address explaining what the audience is about to see, and close with a licenza, a formal dismissal, a framing device that marks the performance as a devotional occasion bounded by prayer rather than an ordinary entertainment with no before or after.