After graduating with degrees in philosophy and literature, she settled in Rome and began to organize immigrant workers in the textile industry, joining the Italian Socialist Party (Partito Socialista Italiano; PSI) in 1900.

During the war, she spent some time in exile in neutral Sweden, where she was affiliated with the Left Socialist movement and became a close friend of Swedish Communist leaders Ture Nerman, Fredrik Ström, Zeth Höglund and Kata Dalström.

This led her to become an open critic of Bolshevism, and she left Russia in 1922, travelling back to Italy to reunite with her friend and comrade Giacinto Menotti Serrati.

After Serrati abandoned the PSI for the Communist Party of Italy (Partito Comunista d'Italia; PCdI) in 1924, she assumed control of his Maximalist (Massimalisti) group until the Fascist authorities forced her into exile in Switzerland, where she edited Avanti!

Edmund Wilson, the noted American man of letters, considered her to be an accomplished poet in five languages (Russian, German, French, Italian, and English) and in 1943 wrote a very favorable article about her poetry in The Nation.