ABSTRACT
The myth of Gaspara Stampa's unhappy relationship with the Venetian nobleman Collaltino di Collalto is recounted throughout the poet's Rime, a narrative whose details are well known: Stampa and Collaltino met in 1548 and they remained together, through highs and lows, for three years. By presenting herself as a neglected, rejected, and ultimately abandoned woman, Stampa includes her poetic narrative within a longstanding Greco-Roman literary tradition of abandoned female lovers, identifying herself with iconic figures like Medea, Ariadne, Sappho, and Dido, as well as their medieval and early modern Italian counterparts, such as Boccaccio's Fiammetta and Ariosto's Olimpia. The Heroides are a poetry of lament, where mythical affairs of the epic and Hellenistic traditions are gathered and adapted to an epistolary mode built on women's fictional voices. Stampa rejects the notion of devoting herself to a single beloved by identifying herself with the salamander and the phoenix when she begins writing about her new flame, the nobleman Bartolomeo Zen.
