In her lives the pride of wounded and betrayed love, the despair of the woman who feels she has lost her man, the gloom of a sunless day, the fear of having lost happiness forever. But Santuzza is not traversed by a passive feeling, she is fueled by extreme determination, she is not a woman who is silent, who weeps in silence. She is a woman endowed with an endowment of emotionality and a vital force of absolute rarity. She is a woman who denounces, she is a woman who is not moved by desires for revenge, but for justice.

The combination of these characteristics delivers to the opera house a unique character, far from any model, in whom we recognize more than in any other the signs of novelty that belong to Cavalleria rusticana and Mascagni's female universe.

This reading is intended to reveal how Cavalleria rusticana is not a jealousy drama or a genre picture; there is something important that, read today, goes beyond the pattern of the adulterous triangle so dear to bourgeois drama: there is an important work on the woman, there is a shattering force that brings to the stage an inner tragedy, one that leaves no escape, one that represents, without possible solutions or accommodations, the lacerations of a macho mentality sadly still alive today.

The message of this musical reading that gives voice to Santuzza, the woman who does not intend to suffer and her inner world, is a strong message: it is necessary to fight stereotypes and prejudices, to denounce injustice, to treat men and women equally, keep away from the rules of patriarchy.