After a noisy but successful opening of La Cenerentola on January 25, 1817, Rossini left Rome for Milan on February 11, accompanied by the Marchese Francesco Sampieri, a wealthy friend who owned an estate outside Bologna. While spending the night in Spoleto on February 17, they both played in the orchestra after they discovered that Il Turco in Italia was playing in the local theater; Sampieri acted as maestro al cembalo and Rossini played double bass. Rossini visited with his parents in Bologna and continued to Milan, where he had agreed to write a semiseria for which a libretto had already been written by Giovanni Gherardini, La gazza ladra. Gherardini had offered the libretto to Ferdinando Paӫr, but he had refused it. After going through the libretto, Rossini wrote to his mother that it was “bellissimo” and a “perfect subject”; he clearly liked the libretto, but he wanted Gherardini to make some changes: “Because of your wide experience at the bar, I leave you entirely free to deal as you see fit with the courtroom scene. But I want you to follow my suggestions about the rest.” Gherardini's libretto was based on a French play by Jean-Marie Théodore Baudouin d’Aubigny and Louis-Charles Caigniez, La pie voleuse, first performed in the Théâtre de la Porte-Saint Martin on April 29, 1815. Baudouin and Caigniez's play was translated into English within months and performed at Drury Lane on October 15 as The Magpie, where it was a considerable success. Both plays belonged to a type of theater that was popular in France from the late 1760s through the French Revolution and gave rise to operas that were also popular—rescue operas, of which La gazza ladra is a late example.

Rescue operas have all but disappeared from today's repertory, with the exception of Beethoven's Fidelio. David Charlton has explained that the term rescue opera is “unhistorical”; it is “not an authentic genre like ‘opera buffa’” and was coined only in the late nineteenth century in an attempt to “set Beethoven's opera in its intellectual context.” A list of rescue operas Charlton compiled goes back to French stage works from the 1760s and 1770s that depicted the rescue of innocent victims of injustice from imprisonment.