Inspired by the spirit of the Lanteri (v.) and St. Joseph Cafasso, and with heroic activity and the expenditure of her wealth, she carried out a grand plan of spiritual and corporal charity. Following the example of what had been done in Paris by the Pastoret, whose asylum rooms she had visited, in 1829 she established in her own palace in Turin an asylum for boys and girls, which she first entrusted to secular teachers and later to the Giuseppine Sisters, replaced in turn by the Sisters of St. Anne of Providence, whom she herself founded in 1834. A second asylum was established in 1835. Meanwhile, the marchioness had founded another series of moral and social works: the “Casa del rifugio” (1825), where wayward girls were gathered to be re-educated and trained in a trade that would allow them to earn an honest living; the convent of the Magdalens, the college of the Magdalens, the Oblates of St. Mary Magdalene (1825–39); the college Giulietta, the workshop of St. Joseph, the Opera famiglia operaia, and the hospice for sick and rickety children (1831–35). These works were consolidated after her death into the vast surviving Opera pia B.
She also deserves credit for founding a house of the Religious of the Sacred Heart and for establishing the parish of St. Julia in Turin. She was, as is well known, the maternal architect of Silvio Pellico; and in her palace she created a notable center of austere intellectual life, frequented also by Cavour and other influential persons. She was also an uncommon writer, especially in her unpublished Journal d’une femme, in her letters and memoirs, partly published by Pellico and Lanza (a selection of all these writings is: La marchesa di B., «Dalle memorie di una giovane signora», Alba 1942).