Not at all exciting in the love interest or shoot-em-up sense, but wonderful stuff and filmed as if you were right there in the Renaissance. Many of the scenes look like Renaissance art.
Rossellini's History Films: Renaissance and Enlightenment (Blaise Pascal / The Age of the Medici / Cartesius). I think most decent libraries have them.
I would put these more in the "educational" category than in the "shallow diversion" category. Rossellini made them for Italian TV so if you ignore the subtitles you can work on your Italian at the same time (as Mrs. BD and her buddy are doing these days - night classes in Italian).