This article carries out a metapoetic reading of Gaspara Stampa’s Rime, one of the most important voices in sixteenth-century Venetian manierism. This interpretation of his love songs allows us to question some of the analytical topics which, at least from the Romantic period, have determined Stampa’s critical reception, and which, in being projected onto female writing, acquire new shades of meaning, open to questioning to a great extent. The Rime present an ambiguous and complex poetry, because in them (sexual) gender becomes (anti)Petrarchal genre. The authoress’ voice “arde sin sentir el mal” [“burns without pain”], like the voices of those women who dare say anything between one line and another, because they have nothing to lose.