Virginia de Leyva was the woman who inspired Alessandro Manzoni’s portrayal of the Nun of Monza in The Betrothed. Manzoni dismissed her fate in just three words — “the unfortunate woman yielded” — and left us with two images so powerful that they have remained etched in the memory of anyone who has attended school in Italy: the little girl playing with dolls dressed as nuns, having been destined for the convent from birth, and the lock of hair escaping from beneath her veil, a small but stubborn sign of defiance. Both are fictional. What Manzoni left untold has been filled in by novels, films and operas, each offering its own version: the lascivious nun, the rebel, the victim of patriarchy. This book returns to the historical record. Drawing on trial documents and the few surviving writings in Virginia’s own hand, it reconstructs her entire story: her forced entry into the convent at thirteen, her almost decade-long affair with Gian Paolo Osio, her secret pregnancies, the murders, and her sentence to be walled up alive in a cell measuring three metres by two. Above all, however, it tells the story of what the myth has been too quick to resolve: Virginia de Leyva survives. And what she makes of her life after imprisonment is perhaps the most unsettling part of her entire story. What emerges is a figure who defies all simplification, a woman who never entirely submits, who manipulates even when she yields. What Lisa Roscioni tells us is the true story behind the most famous silence in Italian literature, a story more extreme than any of its fictional reinventions.