In ballads, narrative is essential and emphasizes above all a skeleton of events which are connected and describe patterns of behavior related to events. These patterns help the narrator and audience to perceive reality by describing what a certain type of man or woman would do in certain situations. Female ballad singers emphasize the value of patterns assigned to ballad narratives by taking a detached view, denying emotional involvement through verbal choices and singing style. This impersonal performance style seems related to the impersonality of ballad narratives. They are not dependent on ordinary chronicles or anecdotes as in Italian broadside ballads, for example.
Narrative ballads are emblematic rather than historical.
One can examine the topics of the Italian ballads, referring to the comprehensive and celebrated Nigra's collection, which includes most ballads actually sung in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Most ballads widespread in Northern Italy cited in Nigra were stories of women and usually about the relationship between women and men. Topics can be categorized into five main groups. Violence done by a man to a woman The most narrated type of violence is abduction, e.g., nos. The woman marries a man who then reveals his will to murder her, but succeeds in killing her husband.