She traveled briefly to Berlin to study with Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff and Hermann Diels.
[1] After the Second World War, she was active in local politics with the Partito Socialista Italiano, where she dealt mostly with the secular maternal schools of Pisa.
Cardini earned national and international recognition as an editor and translator of Sophist and Pythagorean fragments, Pseudo-Aristotlean texts, and the works of Proclus, as well as for her publications on the history of ancient science.
She later completed the first Italian translation of Sidereus nuncius by Galileo Galilei.
Her literary archive is managed by the library of the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa.