She was the second child of Alfredo Cialente, an army officer originally from the Abruzzo region in central Italy and Elsa Wieselberger who had trained as a soprano and came from a musical family in Trieste.
In 1921 she married Enrico Terni (1876–1960), a banker from a Jewish family of Italian origin who had settled in Alexandria, Egypt in the early nineteenth century.
In 1930 her short story "Marianna" was published in the literary magazine L'Italia Letteraria which was edited by Giambattista Angioletti.
[2] From 1940 she wrote antifascist pamphlets and made daily broadcasts from Radio Cairo against the Fascist regime in Italy.
"The position of her female characters preoccupies Cialente throughout her work, not least in the semi-autobiographical Le quattro ragazze Wieselberger",[1] which won the Strega Prize.