Mistress Belcolore

Belcolore is a peasant woman whose beauty and self-possession make her the target of a local priest's persistent and clumsy advances. Rather than submit or make a scene, she plays along just far enough to extract payment and then arranges matters so that the priest is publicly humiliated and she keeps what she has gained. Her cool-headed manipulation of male desire and clerical hypocrisy gives the brigata one of its sharpest pictures of how wit, not virtue alone, protects a woman's interests in a world where both church and neighbor feel entitled to her body.