Daughter of Ursula Hirschmann (sister of the economist Albert O. Hirschman), from whom she learned German, and of the antifascist Eugenio Colorni, one of the creators and signatories of the Ventotene Manifesto, had as her intellectual guide Altiero Spinelli, who became second husband of the mother.
His sister, the economist Eva Colorni, was the wife, until her death in 1985, of the economist Amartya Sen, Nobel Prize for Economics in 1998.
She has another sister (Silvia Colorni) and three younger sisters, Diana, Barbara and Sara Spinelli.
