We are inside the home of a petit-bourgeois family in Rome at the end of the nineteenth century. The landlady’s name is Cachina, and Cachina observes the passing routine of the day, through her own monotonous existence. Cachina’s main concerns are the upkeep of the house and the conflicts with Susanna the maid, the unsettling conversations with her friend, and her life with her partner, a rude doctor. Then something suddenly changes: a chance encounter awakens in Cachina the need to listen to her inner desires, to experience the life of matter and the body, and to go outside in search of the objects of her desires. Yes, before us is Madame Bovary from Italy, similar, but completely different. In 1974, ninety years after the novella was published, Natalia Ginzburg rescued "The Purity of Caccina" from the abyss of oblivion, telling the world about the beauty of the prose of the Neapolitan author Matilda Serrao: This is incredibly simple writing, descriptions of everyday life, of objects and marginal details. But through the simplicity flow rivers of irony, precision and cleverness - a literary talent that makes us become "accomplices in a crime" that may occur.