Born to a Jewish family in Padua, she was educated in that city, as well as in Florence and Hanover. In 1885 she was appointed professor at the R. Istituto superiore femminile di Magistero in Florence. Women increasingly contributed to compiling school textbooks on foreign languages, most frequently French, but also German and English; these, too, were often targeted specifically at young girls, or young pupils of both sexes In Florence, Eugenia Levi devoted her efforts to German, publishing her Deutsch. Tradizioni, storia, cultura, paese e costumi dei Tedeschi. Letture scelte e annotate(1899; German: Traditions, History, Culture, Country, and Costume of the Germans. Selected and Annotated Readings) in two volumes, comprising a detailed grammar of the language and a selection of reading passages.
She published a number of essays in Italian journals and literature anthologies which display an underlying philological attention to, and
training in, language. Among her works, Fiorita di canti tradizionali del popolo italiano (1895) is an anthology of traditional songs of the Italian people across the peninsula, which clearly, in its title, recalls the Canti popolari siciliani (1870–1871, 2 vols; Popular Sicilian Songs) collected by the famous Sicilian physician turned philologist and ethnologist Giuseppe Pitrè (1841–1916), author of the monumental, twenty-five volume collection Bibliografia delle tradizioni popolari d’Italia(1871–1913; Bibliography of Italy’s Popular Traditions), which Levi, not coincidentally, mentions in the preface of her work.
In her Fiorita, Levi links the songs with her interest in the developing discipline of Italian dialectology, explaining that she had organized the 1,250 songs in her anthology on the basis of the dialectal subdivision that Ascoli adopted in his well-known study L’Italia dialettale (orig. 1880 in English; republished in Italian in 1882–1885; Dialectal Italy). She also provided comments, as well as translations, for those words and expressions that differed most from Italian.
