Italiano 
English According to her son Paolo, her marriage was not a happy one. In Monza Laura worked to the education of her children, teaching them to read and write.
Her interest in education is one of the main traits of Laura's personality, alongside her patriotic sentiment, and her work for the improvement of the social condition for women and children, contributing to the creation of a great number of orphanages and to the birth of the Working Women Society, which helped working-class women to become economically independent, and assisted them in the working place.
Mantegazza also put herself at work in the field of education, creating both alphabetization schools for women only, and the Professional Women School (founded in Milan in 1870, in via Ariberto), to help unmarried women becoming financially independent, and married women to earn an extra-income for their household. In that school the first generation of female professionals was formed.
A very active patriot, in 1848, during the riots against Austria-Hungary, which was governing the city at the time, Laura was actively tending to the wounded, raising funds for their care and organizing a service for transporting injured people to the city's hospitals. She was nicknamed "the revolutionary without a gun" for her actions during the 1848 riots. When Austria took back control of the city, Mantegazza sought refuge in Piedmont, and was able to get back to Milan only in 1850.
During the 1850s she met Giuseppe Garibaldi and helped him raise the funds for his "Expedition of the Thousand", with which Garibaldi united the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies to the rest of Italy. In the following years she offered further help to Garibaldi, who was jailed after locking horns with the Italian government.
She died in 1873, at 60. After her death her memory was carried on by the women she helped, who went on operating refuges for working women and for children. In 1906 her body was moved to the Memorial Chapel of Milan's cemetery, an unusual event for a woman.
