Giudice collaborated with national and international left-wing intellectuals, including Angelica Balabanoff, Antonio Gramsci, Lenin, and Umberto Terracini.
[1] Giudice had a "free union" relationship with Carlo Civardi, who had died while fighting as a soldier in World War I, leaving her with seven children to raise.
[1] Giudice was at one time the manager of the Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci at the newspaper Grido del Popolo who had acted as a babysitter to Sapienza’s older siblings.
[3] Sapienza spent her childhood in a non-conformist feminist anti-fascist and anti-clerical environment, where she was exposed to a mix of different class backgrounds and an active political involvement.
Due to her larger-than-life personality and acting talent, she became a central figure in the neorealist cinema and the Communist Party circles of Roman intellectual life.
The couple mixed with among other, authors Alberto Moravia and Elsa Morante, directors Bernardo Bertolucci, Pier Paolo Pasolini and screenwriter Cesare Zavattini.
Freed from the social duties that came with being Maselli’s companion, she wrote two memoirs in quick succession, both published to minor acclaim, Lettera Aperta in 1967 about her childhood, and Il Filo di Mezzogiorno, in 1969 about her experience in psychoanalysis.
[3] Sapienza then threw herself into the task of writing what is now considered her masterpiece, L'arte della gioia (The Art of Joy), which took her nine years to complete and drove her to destitution as she withdrew further from society.
Finished in 1976 monumental historical novel was rejected by publishers because of its length (over 700 pages) and its portrayal of a woman unrestrained by conventional morality and traditional feminine roles.
It detailed a woman’s pursuit of cultural, financial and sexual independence in early-20th-century Sicily, during which she sleeps with both men and women, commits incest and murders a nun.
In the last years of her life, she taught acting at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome and wrote other literary works, some of which remain unpublished.