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Maria Elisabetta was born in Turin on 3rd May 1790. She was the fourth child and second daughter of Celestino and Raffaella Ferrero della Marmora.

Like her brother Edoardo, Maria Elisabetta, also called Babet, was the historian of the family, collecting biographical details and writing down the life stories of the main characters. Her passion for papers meant that she not only preserved valuable records of the lineage to which she belonged, but also documents about her husband’s family were saved from the French Revolution, put in order and handed down to the next generations. Maria Cristina was already a widow at the age of 21 but, although she was said to be “very beautiful”, she decided not to remarry, pursuing her biographical work and devoting herself with great enthusiasm to her botany and geology studies. For a while she was director of the Company of Women in Childbirth and of the Bonne Mort of Moncalieri. Encouraged by her brother Edoardo, she wrote biographies of her father Celestino and mother Raffaella, followed by those of her paternal uncles and other members of the family including her sister Maria Cristina. She spent the last years of her life at her brother Edoardo’s house where she died in 1871 at the age of 81.