Using her inheritance she began charitable work among the poor and sick, in hospitals and in their homes, and also among delinquent and abandoned girls. On 1 April 1808 she was given an abandoned convent where she took in two poor girls from the slum of the San Zeno neighborhood to care for them and to also provide them with an adequate education. One month later on 8 May she moved out of her ancestral palace and moved into what is now the Saint Joseph Convent where other women soon joined her and with whom she formed the Canossian Daughters. In May 1810 the priest brothers and Servants of God Antonio Angelo and Marco Antonio Cavanis invited her to Venice for collaboration. In the meantime, her uncle Girolamo died in July 1814, entrusting his motherless son Carlino (born c. 1797) to her care.