La semplicità ingannata (Deceived Simplicity) is the second episode in a trilogy written by Marta Cuscunà on female resistance. The story is loosely based on the literary works of Arcangela Tarabotti, a 17th-century Italian nun and writer who strongly denounced the practice of forcing young girls who were unsuitable for marriage to enter the ecclesiastical life, even when they had no sincere vocation. It is this same autobiographical account that Tarabotti described in the work from which Cuscunà took the title, La semplicità ingannata, published posthumously in 1654.

In the 17th century, inside the monastery of Santa Chiara in Udine, the sisters organised themselves to transform this cloistered place into a centre of culture and free thought. By opposing the imposed precepts and benefiting from the support of families and the city government, the small community of nuns developed a movement of resistance to patriarchy, which succeeded even in the face of the Inquisition trial. The sisters' story is intertwined with that of another example of resistance, Arcangela Tarabotti, who was forced to enter a monastery at the age of ten because of a physical defect (lameness) that made her unsuitable for marriage. Angelica became a scholar, who never ceased to recount the deprivation of freedom in her works, denouncing the mechanisms that relegated young girls without a vocation to monasteries.