Imagine a young woman, beautiful and self-assured: some might call her audacious.
She must have been enchanting when singing or playing the viola da gamba, often alongside her sister Cassandra, in their maternal home in San Trovaso, a lively gathering place for musicians and writers. Many offer her their verses, some even propose marriage. But Gaspara cherishes her freedom—both amorous and intellectual—and delights in composing sonnets, which she recites in the refined salons of Venetian society.
Born in Padua around 1523, Stampa moved to Venice with her mother and siblings after her father’s death. Well-integrated into the city’s cultured circles, she was admired for her poetic and musical talents. Both her mother and brother allowed her to freely express her artistic vivacity, a condition that set her apart from her contemporaries.
Gaspara was often overwhelmed by love. At the home of the noble Domenico Venier, she met Collaltino di Collalto, an aristocrat from Treviso, who combined a career in arms with a passion for poetry. She fell for him at first sight, entrusting the turmoil of that fatal encounter to her verses: “What wonder it was that at the first assault, young and alone, I was caught in the snare,” she writes in one of the sonnets dedicated to him.
It was an all-consuming love, supported by their shared passion for poetry. However, Collaltino, though fascinated by Gaspara, did not fully return her feelings. Preoccupied with his Treviso estate and his relationship with Henry II of France, whom he served as a man of arms, he was often absent from Venice.
Gaspara was consumed by torment, and the knowledge that other men loved her brought no solace. “He flees from me; I pursue him; others pine for me.” In three stark phrases, Stampa captures the paradox of loves that chase each other without ever meeting, a whirlwind of desire and disappointment that becomes all the more bitter.
With the same disillusionment, she acknowledges the weakness of Collaltino’s affection: “I am so weary of waiting (…) and he lives happily on his hills.” When Collaltino, after three years of an unstable relationship, left her for good, Gaspara was devastated: “From then on, I have trembled and sweated, wept, despaired, and desired.”
Yet, unexpectedly, after some time, Gaspara fell in love again: “I feel a fire equal to the first,” she writes in one of the fourteen sonnets dedicated to Bartolomeo Zen, her last and more stable, more fulfilling love.
With renewed enthusiasm, the poet confesses in one of her most famous sonnets that love is for her a condition of life: a fire that nourishes and regenerates her, like the salamander with which she identifies:
Love has made me such that I live in fire,
like a new salamander in the world, and like
that other no less strange creature,
that lives and breathes in the same place.
All my delights and my joy,
are to live burning and not feel pain,
to not care whether he who causes this
has pity on me little or much.
Hardly had the first flame been extinguished,
than Love lit another, which, as I feel,
is even more alive and greater than before.
And I do not regret burning in love,
so long as he who has newly won my heart
remains satisfied and content with my fire.
Gaspara Stampa died of fever at just 31 years old, in 1554. That same year, her sister Cassandra oversaw the publication of Rime, over three hundred Petrarchan sonnets in which the poet poured out her feelings with great immediacy.
Yet, after her death, her poetry fell into oblivion.
Only with the 1738 edition, curated by a descendant of Collaltino, were the Rime rediscovered and recognized as a masterpiece of Renaissance female poetry. Despite 19th- and early 20th-century criticism, which found Gaspara’s candor shocking and considered her bold style fitting only for a courtesan, today, Stampa’s dignity as a cultured and free woman has been restored. Her writing is celebrated for its intellectual vitality, as it legitimizes feelings such as passion and desire for women, helping to redefine the female role in Renaissance literature.
