The title La Gazza Ladra is translated as ‘The Thieving Magpie’, which as expected is a story based around the theft of some silverwear which a magpie has absconded for its nest, a crime which a servant girl is wrongly accused of. La Gazza Ladra is an "opera semiseria", a genre from Rossini’s time which was used to define a drama with a happy ending in which the innocent victim, unjustly condemned, should be saved from the scaffold at the eleventh hour and the rascal persecutor punished.