During the first decades of the sixteenth century—a period of political and religious turmoil in Italy—two women, Costanza d’Avalos, the chatelaine of the castle of Ischia, and her niece by marriage, Vittoria Colonna, hosted literary gatherings on Ischia. This cenacolo, or coterie, a rich subject for scholarship, has been studied only partially up until now. Scholars have noted its role as an intellectual and spiritual milieu of Colonna and its function as a refuge for intellectuals and poets forced to leave their homes, on account of political or physical threats. It has also been emphasized that the d’Avalos-Colonna circle was one of the first examples of a cenacolo run by women. It is interesting to note, in this connection, that female scholars dominated twentieth-century work in this area, notably Amalia Giordano (1906) and Suzanne Thérault (1968). Giordano established the division of the d’Avalos-Colonna cenacolo into four periods: the first (1509–12) in which Jacopo Sannazaro, Benedetto Gareth (‘Cariteo’) and a few other poets participated; the second (1517–25), featuring Galeazzo di Tarsia, Girolamo Britonio and Jacopo Campanile (‘Capanio’); the third (1527–28), seeing the participation of Giano Anisio, Paolo Giovio, Marcantonio Minturno and Marcantonio Flaminio; and the last period (1533–36), when Bernardo Tasso, Luigi Tansillo, Angelo di Costanzo and Berardino Rota were members of the circle. Therault subsequently modified Giordano's division by amalgamating the first and second periods to a single period from 1509–25, in which Sannazaro was the leading figure. This framework has proven more productive.