Moderata Fonte  Moderata Fonte, pseudonym of Modesta di Pozzo di Forzi (or Zorzi), also known as Modesto Pozzo (or Modesta, feminization of Modesto), (1555–1592) was a Venetian writer and poet. Besides the posthumously-published dialogues, "Giustizia delle donne" and "Il merito delle donne" (gathered in "The Worth of Women", 1600), for which she is best known, she wrote a romance and religious poetry. Details of her life are known from the biography by Giovanni Niccolò Doglioni (1548-1629), her uncle, included as a preface to the dialogue. Pozzo's parents, Girolamo da Pozzo and Marietta da Pozzo ("née" dal Moro), died of the plague in 1556, when she was just a year old, and she and her older brother Leonardo were placed in the care of their maternal grandmother and her second husband. She spent several years in the convent of Santa Marta where, thanks to her extraordinary memory, she was often displayed as a child prodigy. She was able to repeat long sermons she had heard or read only once. At the age of nine she was returned to her grandmother’s family where she learned Latin and composition from her grandfather, Prospero Saraceni, a man of letters, as well as from her brother, Leonardo. Her brother also taught her to read and write in Latin, draw, sing, and play the lute and harpsichord. On 15 February 1582, at twenty-seven years old, Moderata wed Filippo de’ Zorzi. Their marriage seemed to reflect equality and mutual respect evidenced by de’ Zorzi returning her dowry a year and a half after their wedding. An official document dated October 1583 states that de’ Zorzi returns the dowry "thanks to his pure kindness and to the great love and good will that he has felt and feels for" her. Likewise, Moderata Fonte describes her husband in one of her writings as a man of "virtue, goodness and integrity". These actions were significant in this time period, since women did not typically have property under their own name with which they could govern. Furthermore, the appeal for women to own property has been a longstanding debate in feminist advocacy. One of Fonte’s first known works is a musical play performed before the Doge Da Ponte in 1581 at the festival of St. Stephen’s Day.