She entrusted to the novel *Stella mattina* (1921) the memory of her tormented youth. Great interest was aroused by her first volume of verse, *Fatalità* (1892), an emphatic exaltation of socialist ideas, with some anticlerical undertones. Less successful was *Tempeste* (1894), which repeated the same themes. After her marriage, she dedicated to motherhood the eponymous volume of verse (1904), in which the pain of man and the mystery of the soul find, because deepened by experience, effective expression. A still more observed inward exploration drives the collection *Dal profondo* (1910) and impels N. toward a keener sense of solitude (*L'esilio*, 1914). After *Libro di Mara* (1919), a vigorous, often stark expression of a late love suddenly cut short by death, there is a turn toward the contemplation, sometimes painful, of nature in *I canti dell'Isola* (1924). From then on, N.’s thought turns more decisively to God (*Vesperina*, 1930; *Il dono*, 1936). While working on *Fons amoris*, a posthumous volume (1946) that may be considered her spiritual testament, she intended to prepare a trilogy in prose: *S. Caterina da Siena*, *S. Teresa del Bambino Gesù*, *S. Francesca Saverio Cabrini*; only the essay on the Saint of Lisieux appeared. *Il Crocifisso rotto*, to which N. had devoted one of her most significant spiritual pages, was placed beside her and closed with her in the coffin, according to her testamentary wish.
The undeniable influences of Leopardi, Carducci, Pascoli, and d’Annunzio do not prejudice the precise originality of tone in N.’s poetry. Her moral inquiry into the problems of life is conveyed through a succession of vivid images, logically structured and free from hermeticism. Nor does the clarity of her poetics (poetry of sentiment, not sentimental) settle into rhythm with complacent indulgence; rather, it resolves within itself, in supreme harmony, those inner landscapes of the soul discovered through sincere lyrical emotion: rebellions, despondencies, resentments, and a bitter sense of life are ultimately calmed in a progressive inner enlightenment, in the genuine understanding of Christian values, in the definitive and integral adherence to the Catholic faith, and in the yearning to share the spiritual serenity she had attained with other souls. N.’s volume *Fatalità* is on the Index (*decr. 14 July 1893*).