Bodini completed his secondary education at the Liceo Artistico di Brera, where among the teachers was the sculptor Vitaliano Marchini, who will direct him towards the deepening of the sculptural technique at the Brera Academy, which he enrolled in 1950. In the middle of 1950, with Guerreschi, Vaglieri, Romagnoni, Ceretti, Ferroni and Banchieri, he was a member of the Milanese group of young artists, called Realismo Essenziale. Teaching has a fundamental importance in his career: first as an assistant at the Liceo Artistico and subsequently in 1977 at the Brera Academy with the chair of Marble Technology; in 1978 at the Carrara Academy with the chair of Sculpture, he was then appointed Director of the same Academy until 1987, and finally in 1991 President. He leaves teaching in Carrara to take up the Chair of Sculpture at the Darmstadt Polytechnic of Architecture. The relationship with Germany continues and lasts over time, with numerous exhibitions since 1969 and the creation of the great monument to the Göttingen Seven in Parliament Square in Hanover, in 1998. Starting in 1970, after wood and bronze, his research is refined in the use of marble, an essential material for the cycle of large public works, which will begin in the 1980s.
In 1962 he was invited to the XXXI Venice International Art Biennale where he presented seven works, returning there in 1982. In 1965 and 1972 he took part in the Rome Quadrennial, of which he was appointed Councilor in the 1990s. Honorary citizen of Carrara, he was also awarded the President of the Republic Award for Sculpture by the Accademia di San Luca (1977), which was followed by the Bolaffi Award, the Michelangelo Buonarroti Sculpture Award. In 1999 the Floriano Bodini Civic Museum was inaugurated, with a donation of works by him and his contemporaries and a large collection of books.