Maria Antonietta Terzoli was born in Como (Italy), studied at the Universities of Pavia and Bologna, and taught at the Universities of Zurich and Geneva. Since 1991 she is professor at the University of Basel, where she directs the Institute of Italian Studies. She has worked on literary texts from the 16th to the 20th centuries, also from a comparatist point of view, and she has published widely, in particular on Piccolomini, Parini, Alfieri, Monti, Foscolo, Leopardi, Ungaretti and Gadda. In 2005 she was awarded the ‘Moretti' prize for Italian philology.

In addition to numerous specialised journal articles, Maria Antonietta Terzoli authored the following volumes: Il libro di Jacopo . Scrittura sacra nell'‘Ortis' (Rome 1988), La casa della Cognizione (Milan 1993 e 2005), Le lingue di Gadda (Rome 1995), Poesia travestita (Novara 1999; co-authored with Maria Corti), Foscolo (Rome-Bari 2000 and 2008), I margini del libro. Indagine teorica e storica sui testi di dedica (Rome-Padua 2004), Prime lettere di Jacopo Ortis. Un giallo editoriale tra politica e censura (Rome 2004), Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini und Basel. Enea Silvio Piccolomini e Basilea (Basel 2005), Enea Silvio Piccolomini: Uomo di lettere e mediatore culturale, Gelehrter und Vermittler der Kulturen (Basel 2006), Con l'incantesimo della parola. Foscolo scrittore e critico (Rome 2007).
She also published critical and annotated editions of Foscolo ( Vestigi della storia del sonetto , Rome 1993; Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis , Turin-Paris 1995), Gadda ( Poesie 1992 and 1993), Ungaretti ( Lettere a Giovanni Papini , Milan 1988; Poesie e prose liriche , Milan 1989; Lettere a Giuseppe Prezzolini , Rome 2000), Dionisotti ( Un'Italia tra Svizzera e Inghilterra , Bellinzona 2002), Leopardi ( Autobiografie imperfette and Diario d'amore , Florence 2004), Saba ( Intermezzo quasi giapponese , Parma 2007).

Since 2002 she is leading a research project on printed dedications in the Italian tradition (www.margini.unibas.ch). The project is linked to the journal “Margini. Giornale della dedica e altro”.