The Unfortunate One: The Infinite, Irresistible Mystery of the Nun of Monza

Who was Sister Virginia Maria, born Dona Marianna de Leyva? An unhappy woman, a passionate and in love? A victim or a perpetrator? A murderer or a scapegoat to purify and justify the hypocrisies, injustices, and discrimination of an entire community—that of 17th-century Spanish Milan?

With the sensitivity and wit to which we are accustomed in many of her books, Edgarda Ferri attempts to resolve these questions surrounding the figure of the woman we have for centuries called, in Manzoni's style, the "nun of Monza." She does so in her latest work, La sventurata (The Unfortunate One, Le Piccole pagine, 2026, €16.00, 203 pages), not a biography but an exploration of the interrogations and records of the trial involving Sister Virginia Maria between 1606 and 1608. The charges: consensual loss of virginity, fornication, carnal sacrilege, voluntary homicide of the lay nun Caterina da Meda, suspected complicity in the murder of the apothecary Rainerio Roncino, and consent to magical practices. In the end, she received a very harsh sentence, confinement in a cell with a single grated window opening onto the outside world. A grate as an everlasting reminder that although buried, she was alive and the time for the consolation of death had not yet come.

Drawing on contemporary documents, deeds, and notarial transcripts, Edgarda Ferrin allows us to witness—as privileged spectators before the stage of history—the long series of interrogations. A full twenty-five witnesses and defendants filed past the investigator: abbesses, nuns, cooks, nurses, ironers, servants, gardeners, sorcerers, and a priest. Twenty-five people, constantly contradicting each other, accusing, exonerating, exonerating themselves, swearing, perjuring themselves, blaming the devil, revealing unrepeatable intimacies, grotesque superstitions, and crimes, provided the inquisitor with all the elements of a morbid tale of love and death. A tale intertwined with carnal passions and brutal murders, elements that led to the inevitable conviction of Sister Virginia and all her accomplices.

Yet, despite her undeniable faults, reading the pages Edgarda Ferri dedicates to her, one cannot help but take Sister Virginia's side, one cannot help but seek understanding. One finds oneself in the shoes of this young woman, a victim of the mechanisms of the society of her time and of the social class to which she belonged. Of course, in the seventeenth century, being born into nobility could be a privilege...or a misfortune, as it was for Donna Marianna. A misfortune because she was a female in an aristocracy where only men counted. A misfortune because she lost her mother when she was only two years old, and her father—Count Don Martino of the powerful de Leyva family—saw in his orphaned daughter only a problem, a financial burden to be shed as quickly as possible once he remarried and became the father of three sons.

At that point, Marianna, just thirteen years old, was "laid down," to use the idiom used in contemporary documents, in the poorest and most troubled cloistered monastery in Monza. "Laid down," indeed. This is the verb—mean and cruel in its implications—that caught Edgarda Ferri's attention and drove her to want to know more about a noble girl who, rather than being left free to live, was deposited, like an object, in a secluded place, far from everyone's life. Estranged from the world. Forgotten and then unforgettable, because she was enigmatic: fluid, elusive, icy, in love, passionate, murderous. The enigma par excellence. An infinite, irresistible mystery.