Cardini was born in
Arezzo on August 24, 1890. She received her degree in Greek philology in
Naples in 1914. She traveled briefly to
Berlin to study with
Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff and
Hermann Diels. Cardini was active for several years as a
dadaist poet. She was friends with, among others,
Tristan Tzara, but abandoned poetic practice in 1920.
Cardini worked as a high school teacher, first in Parma, where she met her future husband Sebastiano Timpanaro Sr., then in a private Florentine school, and finally in Pisa. Cardini and Timpanaro married in 1922 in Naples.[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.[2]
Pitagorici. Testimonianze e frammenti, 3 voll., Firenze, La Nuova Italia, 1958–64.
Il «Cielo» di
Aristotele, in: "Physis. Rivista Internazionale di Storia della Scienza", VI (1964).
Pseudo-Aristotele, De lineis insecabilibus, Introduction, translation, and commentary, Milano-Varese, Istituto editoriale cisalpino, 1970 ("Testi e documenti per lo studio dell'antichità", 32).
Proclo, Commento al I libro degli "
Elementi" di
Euclide, Introduction, translation, and notes, Pisa, Giardini, 1978.
Tra antichità classica e impegno civile, edited by Sebastiano Timpanaro, Pisa, ETS, 2001.
Pitagorici Antichi. Testimonianze e frammenti, Milano, Bompiani, 2010.
^"The Special Collections". Biblioteca della Scuola Normale Superiore (in Italian). Retrieved 10 March 2021.
Bibliography
Graziano Arrighetti, Sebastiano Timpanaro: ritratto della madre, in: Omaggio a Sebastiano Timpanaro, edited by Walter Lapini, La Spezia, Agorà, 2013 ("Sileno. Rivista di studi classici e cristiani", XXXIX), pp. 3–12.
Giovanna Derenzini, Maria Timpanaro Cardini, in: "Physis. Rivista Internazionale di Storia della Scienza", XXII (1980), pp. 133–145.