This work is considered among the most powerful and original poetic expressions of Italian literature from the 16th century,[1] employing topics and techniques which make her, according to some scholars, a forerunner of Romantic poetry.

She, her mother and her siblings (five brothers: Marcantonio, Scipione, Decio, Cesare, Fabio, and one sister: Porzia) were abandoned by Giovanni Michele in 1528, when he was forced to seek refuge in France after having supported the invading French army against the Spanish monarch Charles V for the conquest of the Kingdom of Naples.

[8] From the beginning, animosity marked the relationship between Isabella and her three younger brothers Cesare, Decio and Fabio, who perhaps envied their gifted sister and the attention lavished on her education.

[1] Nonetheless, she had the opportunity to befriend her learned neighbours: Diego Sandoval de Castro, baron of Bollita (the present-day Nova Siri) and castellan of Cosenza, and his wife Antonia Caracciolo.

Of Spanish heritage, Diego, described as a handsome and brave soldier who fought for Charles V's army in the Algiers expedition, was a published poet, member of the Florentine Academy and well connected to the power structure in Naples being a protégé of Viceroy Pedro de Toledo.

While visiting Valsinni, Croce tried to discover Isabella's tomb but renovations in the church had destroyed all traces of the di Morra family burials, and his exploration behind an underground wall revealed only heaps of bones.

[15] Although her form, vocabulary and phrases follow the Petrarchist fashion of the period, she is distinguished by her gloomy and distressing tone, possibly influenced by medieval poets such as Dante Alighieri (especially the Inferno chapter and Rime Petrose lyrics)[16] and Jacopone da Todi.

Her poetry is very personal, influenced by her own family condition and forced isolation; she wrote on impulse in order to vent her frustration, without any literary adornment or formal elegance.

Unlike other women's poems, which are principally based on a celebration of idealized love, in Isabella's work there is only space for existential pain, grudge and loneliness, making her a distinctive figure among Petrarchist poets of the time.

Fortune is her personification of mankind's cruelty towards "every good-natured heart" (ogni ben nato core),[21] implicitly condemning a world in which tyranny and violence prevail over virtue.

[22] She expresses repugnance towards her homeland, described as an "infernal valley" (valle inferna) and "cursed place" (denigrato sito), surrounded by "lonely and dark woods" (selve erme ed oscure), inhabited by "irrational people, without intelligence" (gente irrazional, priva d'ingegno), and crossed by the "turbid Siri" (torbido Siri, today known as Sinni) the river running in the valley below her castle, whose continuous murmur as it flowed downstream into the sea increases her sense of isolation and despair.

[23] This has led to the singular theory that her sister Porzia and Diego Sandoval were corresponding and then became victims of the murderers; accordingly Isabella, affected by the tragedy, threw herself into the river, since there is no clue as to where she might have been buried.

[11] She scans the sea waiting for a ship to bring good news about her exiled father (who lived comfortably in France, ignoring her fate),[24] in the vain hope that her condition would improve with his return.

Charles V (known as "Caesar" in the lyrics) is accused of "preventing a father from helping his daughter" (privar il padre di giovar la figlia) and Francis I is the "great king" (gran re), to whom all hopes for her own liberation were addressed, but they were shattered as the French monarch was finally defeated by his rival, making Isabella even more depressed.

Her final hope is to see herself "totally freed from the stormy terrestrial cloud, and among the blessed souls" (sgombrata tutta dal terrestre nembo, e fra l’alme beate).

[29] According to Paul F. Grendler's Encyclopedia of the Renaissance in association with The Renaissance Society of America, her work is an "impressive prefigurement of Romanticism"[30] and he states: "no other poet prior to Isabella di Morra infused such personal depth into poetry, bringing new drama to the lyric precisely because it so closely addresses the tragic circumstances of her life", contributing "to the development of a new sensibility in poetic language, one grounded in a kind of life writing that raises the biographical, the political, the familial, and the personal to a genuinely lyric stature".