On her first visit outside her palazzo, she injures her foot, wanders into the Jewish Ghetto, and meets a young man called Noé, who helps her and gives her a pair of shoes, in return for her working off the debt for him at a printers' workshop, copying out handbills.

Meanwhile, at home, she and Laura persuade their father to allow them to join their brothers in tutorials - Donata begins learning to read and write, and about architecture, business and history.

Donata has no idea what her future will hold, but eventually her father reveals that her tutor, Messer Zonico, has gone to the University of Padua to persuade them to allow her to take up the doctorate course in philosophy.

and concluded "While readers will be rightly skeptical at Donata’s speedy mastery of not only written Venetian but Latin as well, they will nevertheless find themselves absorbed in her story and the snapshot of her city that it provides.

and "Enjoying the tour of historical Venice and the taste of its complex society and government, readers may not mind Donata's seeming immunity to the mores and prejudices of her day..."[2]