After several banishments for his political activities, her anarchist father was exiled to the small hilltop town of Cutigliano in 1921, 25 km northwest of Pistoia, where he died of a heart attack in 1925 after being chased by fascist hoodlums.

Her childhood in Pistoia was spent in the anxious company of her mother's family who, disapproving of her anarchist father's beliefs and activities, was instrumental in causing her parents to separate.

The emotional wrench of her parents' separation and her deep love for the father she idolized and later repudiated, only to return full circle as an adult, is recounted in Ritratto in piedi (Full-Length Portrait).

Not only did the family drama figure large in her literary creations, but also the Tuscan landscape played a prominent role, beginning with childhood impressions of Pistoia.

to stir me, open my eyes, bring out a sweet perversity, and protect me at the same time; there had been curves of well-defined activity to persuade me that I lived in a place made for me; those mountains in the background were my cape, my protection…"[1] Manzini moved to Florence with her mother in 1916, to finish high school and attend the university, preparing to be a teacher.

The mission of Solaria was to bring into Italian letters the stimulus of innovative European writers such as Marcel Proust, André Gide, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce, and Americans such as Ernest Hemingway.

The hours shattered in noisy big city traffic wasted the most intimate energies in obedience to a rule that the more exteriorly exacting it was the more alien it was to my deepest needs.

Her works appeared in such periodicals as Campo di Marte, Letteratura, Oggi, La Fiera Letteraria, Milano-Sera, and Gazzetta del Popolo.

Afflicted from childhood with lung weakness and a cough (the protagonist of La Sparviera), and finally dependent on oxygen, she died in Rome on 31 August 1974, five months after the death of her long-time companion.

From the time Manzini's first novel, Tempo innamorato, appeared, to her last prose collection, La soglia, critical curiosity was focused less on content than on her idiosyncratic writing style.