Published anonymously, the book contains a description of the life in Rome's underworld during the first third of the 16th century, focussing particularly on the world of immigrant women from Spain and Spanish Southern Italy.

It is considered a book descendant of Celestina (written some thirty years before by Fernando de Rojas) because of the literary genre, the novel in dialogue, and one of the earliest manifestations of the picaresque novel.

Without money, Lozana goes to the Spanish downtown in Rome to request help; there, the women see her abilities in cooking, and creating beauty products (although her face is a little bit disfigured by syphilis).

This makes the book an eloquent, realistic testimony of the manners and life in the Roman underworld from the years 1513 to 1524 and the ulterior attack by the imperial forces of Charles V in 1527 that led to the finalisation of the first period of the Renaissance.

The literary aspects in this book are the social description of characters as Lozana and Rampin, the defense of the Jews (in a historic moment when an intolerant attitude against them, as well as Muslims, had begun in Spain; also supported by the theory that makes Francisco Delicado a converso).