Based in Italy for the majority of her career, she made a number of recordings and established herself as one of the world's finest lyric coloratura sopranos of the 1930s and 1940s.
Her success was such that she was immediately engaged to sing the part in a complete recording of the opera, with the baritone Luigi Piazza and the tenor Tino Folgar performing the leading male roles.
Pagliughi's fame spread throughout Italy and she was invited to sing at all the major opera centres, including Turin, Parma, Venice, Florence, Rome and Naples.
Critics acclaimed her as the successor of Toti dal Monte (1893–1975) in the Rossini-Donizetti-Bellini repertory, in which her sweetly limpid voice, agile technique and expressive phrasing were shown to best effect.
She became extremely stout as she grew older, which limited her capacity to be convincing in 'girlish' roles, no matter how well she sang them, and she quit the stage in 1947; but she continued to be heard on Italian radio RAI until 1956, when she retired for good and turned to teaching with students such as the Swedish soprano Hjördis Schymberg.