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The first section of the exhibition presents one of the most intriguing and controversial female figures in literature of all time: the Nun of Monza. Her story is recounted in the pages of Alessandro Manzoni’s *The Betrothed*, a novel inspired by a famous scandal that rocked the city of Monza in the early 17th century. Here, visitors can see the two protagonists of the scandal: Count Egidio, painted around 1867 by the Monza-based master Mosè Bianchi – a wicked lover and seducer – and Sister Gertrude, the nun held captive, portrayed by the Milanese painter Giuseppe Penuti. In Manzoni’s narrative, the two represent the very epitome of guilt, secrecy and clandestine passion consummated within the convent walls. In Mosè Bianchi’s painting, the portrait of Count Egidio emerges through a dense, modern style, rich in chiaroscuro contrasts, typical of the artist’s pre-Scapigliati sensibility. Egidio is not depicted as a classic novel villain, but as a young man of ambiguous and penetrating charm. This male figure is echoed, with symmetrical and tragic resonance, in Giuseppe Penuti’s painting. Sister Gertrude is captured in a moment of profound spiritual and existential crisis, flanked by a skull – an element that introduces the theme of vanitas, that is, a reflection on the transience of earthly beauty and of youth sacrificed on the altar of family obligations.

Both artists eschew the rhetoric of grand historical painting to focus on the intimacy of the drama. Through the characters’ gazes and the atmospheric backgrounds, Bianchi and Penuti succeed in giving form to uncertainties and feelings of guilt, masterfully situating the nineteenth-century female experience within that complex moral inquiry which steered Italian art towards a psychological analysis of modernity.