Pane performed this piece in the Galleria Diagramma in Milan, in front of an audience of only women. Dressed in all white, she entered the gallery with a bouquet of red roses, which she offered and took back while she sat, stood, or laid on the floor. She removed the thorns and pierced her arm with them, arranging them in a neat row. She then took a razor blade and cut into the palm of her hand. Now with a bouquet of white roses stained by her bloody palm, she repeated the offering and taking back of the flowers. As she performed all of these actions, two voices read letters between mothers and daughters, friends, and lovers.

Azione Sentimentale is a complex, multifaceted piece that utilizes the visual language of ritual and religion to comment on pleasure and pain, love between women, and "the female condition analyzed in its most intimate and universal parts," as the Museo Madre writes. Pane alludes to Christian theology in the contrast of white and red, the blood, the stigmata markings on her hands, and the allusions to sacrifice. Monica Lombardi notes that in ritual "sufferance [is] a way of representing spirituality, carrying a deep emotional and symbolic charge." With the inclusion of the reading of the intimate, sometimes erotic letters, Pane is commenting on the sometimes subtle, sometimes explicit, eroticism in much of religious ritual.