Veronica Gambara

Veronica Gambara (29 or 30 November 1485 – 13 June 1550) was an Italian poet and politician. She was the ruler of the County of Correggio from 1518 until 1550.

Biography Born in Pralboino (now in the Province of Brescia), in Lombardy, Italy, Gambara came from a distinguished family, one of the seven children of Count Gianfrancesco da Gambara and Alda Pio da Carpi. Her family contained a number of distinguished female intellectuals, including her great-aunts, the humanist poets Ginevre and Isotta Nogarola. Veronica was also a niece of Emilia Pia, the principal female interlocutor of Baldessare Castiglione's Il Cortegiano.

Gambara received a humanist education, studying Latin, Greek, philosophy, theology and scripture.

Under Gambara's rule, the small court of Correggio became something of a salon, visited by such important figures as Pietro Bembo, Gian Giorgio Trissino, Marcantonio Flaminio, Ludovico Ariosto, and Titian. Little of her poetry was published during her lifetime, though it circulated in manuscript and was well-known throughout Italy by 1530. Gambara primarily composed poetry in Italian falling into four categories: poems on political issues, devotional poems, Virgilian pastoral, and love poems to her husband. Her political poems are particularly notable for expressing a concept of Italy as an entity centuries prior to unification. Most of her poems are sonnets, although she also wrote madrigals, ballads, and stanze in ottava rima. She also composed a number of poems in Latin, including an ode for Charles V with which she greeted the fellow sovereign on his visit to Correggio in 1530.

Gambara was in correspondence with a number of important scholars and poets of the day. Beyond the above-mentioned Pietro Bembo, she corresponded with the poet Bernardo Tasso, the writer Matteo Bandello, and author and playwright Pietro Aretino (who would come to slander her as a "laureated harlot," an attack Gambara simply ignored). She also exchanged letters with Charles V. Gambara's letters, never intended for publication, shed light on her personal life. In a 1549 letter to Ludovico Rosso she admits to exhaustion with her responsibilities, and expresses a desire to retire to a solitary country life.