The war forced her to interrupt her studies at the artistic high school in Florence, an experience that influenced her political views. She was a communist-leaning anti-fascist right up to the Hungarian uprising. After graduating from the Politecnico di Milano, she married the architect Buzzi in 1954; a year later saw the birth of their daughter Giovanna - who was to become a well-known costume designer -, but the couple separated a few years later. At first, she worked from home, on relatively small-scale design and interior projects, and between 1955 and 1965 she collaborated with Ernesto Nathan Rogers on the magazine Casabella-Continutà, published by Editoriale Domus. The magazine was the focus of a heated debate over modernism, to which Aulenti was relatively indifferent; she was the only woman in an editorial team full of men, whom she dubbed “the roosters of the newsroom”. She was not interested in being labelled a critic of the Neo-liberty movement that the magazine promoted: what she wanted to do, above all, was to work. However, she remained close to Nathan Rogers, serving as his voluntary assistant at the Politecnico until 1969. She then became romantically involved with Carlo Ripa di Meana, and attended the Turati socialist association in Milan, although she never signed up with the party. She participated in founding the Libertà e Giustizia political movement in 2002, and was part of the Committee of Guarantors for the party for a number of years alongside Enzo Biagi, Umberto Eco and Guido Rossi. Like many intellectuals, she was involved and committed, yet her main interest remained design. She was also vice-president of ADI, the Industrial Design Association, which assigns the most prestigious design award, the Golden Compass, an award she won in 1967 for the Spider lamp and posthumously in 2026 for the 1979 “Tavolo con ruote” wheeled table for Fontana Arte.