The Italian soprano studied at the Accademia Chigiana in her hometown of Siena, won numerous international competitions, and made her debut in 1989 at the Teatro Comunale in Florence. Since then, she has performed at all the major festivals and on the world's great stages, including La Scala in Milan, the Opéra Bastille in Paris, the Royal Opera House Covent Garden in London, as well as in Berlin, Amsterdam, Bilbao, Madrid, and Venice, and at the Maggio Musicale in Florence and the Rossini Festival in Pesaro. She has worked with conductors such as Alberto Zedda, Fabio Biondi, Bruno Campanella, James Conlon, Emmanuelle Haïm, René Jacobs, Lorin Maazel, Zubin Mehta, Riccardo Muti, Seiji Ozawa, Antonio Pappano, Evelino Pidò, Georges Prêtre, Christophe Rousset, and Marcello Viotti.

Her extensive repertoire spans from Baroque to contemporary music, with a focus on Bel Canto literature since the 18th century, which she brings to life on stage in a particularly captivating and unique way. She has sung many of the emblematic virtuoso roles in the operas of Traetta, Mozart, Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti, Meyerbeer, Verdi, Gounod, Offenbach, Bizet, and Massenet, including Verdi's Traviata at the reopening of the reconstructed La Fenice in its original premiere location, as well as the title role in Dinorah and Marguérite de Valois in Les Huguenots as part of the Meyerbeer cycle at the Deutsche Oper Berlin.