Education

Bergalli was the daughter of a Piedmontese political exile and shoemaker, Giovan Giacomo Bergalli, and Diana Ingali.

The Somasco cleric Antonio Alberghetti and the influential poet Apostolo Zeno took care of Bergalli's humanist education, while she also received painting lessons from Rosalba Carriera, a prominent Venetian painter with whom she would later collaborate.

Bergalli learned the languages she would translate from very early in her life: the abbot and librarian Antonio Sforza taught her Latin, and her father taught her French.

Career

Bergalli was among the first professional writers in eighteenth-century Italy to attempt a complete emancipation from the logic of patronage, and her intense career included different literary undertakings, as playwright, poet and translator.

Some of the plays she authored at the beginning of her writing activity were very successful, to the point of being performed in Venice and at the royal court in Vienna with the music of famous composers such as Giovanni Porta, Giuseppe Giovanni Bonno or Tommaso Albinoni.

In 1725, she was admitted to the Venetian branch of the Accademia degli Arcadi with the name Irminda Partenide.

The poems Bergalli wrote until the end of her life were published in several collections of occasional verse, and she herself also edited a radical anthology of women poets (1726) and a collection of rhymes by Gaspara Stampa (1736). Bergalli consciously included herself as part of a long genealogy of Italian women authors, challenging the male-dominated canons of the time and showing her own ambitions as an independent writer.

In the years after her marriage with Gaspare Gozzi in 1738, Bergalli gave birth to five children and took up the management of her husband's financially precarious household, while directing most of her efforts towards the production of translations to increase the family's earnings.

From 1747 to 1748, together with her spouse Bergalli became the director of the Sant'Angelo theatre and enacted a series of innovative reforms she had designed on paper in her plays, such as the substitution of the commedia dell'arte's improvised masks with more defined characters from Venetian society, not unlike what her near contemporary Carlo Goldoni do would shortly after .

By the end of her life, Bergalli undoubtedly was the most prominent woman of letters in Venice.

Financial Situation

Issued from a lower-class family, Bergalli struggled economically her whole life.

After the death of her father-in-law Jacopo Antonio Gozzi, Bergalli was accused by her brother-in-law Carlo Gozzi of having squandered the family's wealth to finance her own activities. The subsequent dispute became a long legal battle that eventually resulted in the dissolution of Bergalli's marriage.

Her experience as theatrical producer also proved to be a financial loss, notwithstanding Bergalli's efforts to reduce any superfluous expense.