Americo Del Ventura was born in Rome on 12 March 1903, on via del Babuino, and studied violin at the Collegio degli Artigianelli in the city's Santa Prisca district. In 1921 he began working as an accompanist for silent films at three Roman cinemas — the Imperiale on via Frattina, and the Centrale and Romano at piazza Campo de' Fiori — playing in the orchestra of a Naples-trained maestro named Tavernier and with Giovanni Rinaldo Palombi, a teacher at the Conservatorio Santa Cecilia. It was during this decade of silent-film accompaniment, not before it, that Del Ventura first turned his violin toward jazz.

In 1930 he joined the orchestra backing Harry Flemming, an American-born, Ethiopia-raised dancer and singer who toured widely through Europe. The band was a real, multinational hot-jazz outfit: trumpeters Angelo Celli, Harry Phillips and Gaetano Gimelli, trombonists Eddie Norman and Beppe Mojetta, alto saxophonists Lou Rothé and José Casa, tenor saxophonist Freddy Culley, clarinetist Matteo Ortuso, guitarist Cosimo Di Ceglie, bassist Ralph Phillips, drummer Rudy Pätz, and pianist/arranger Bobby Wolley. With this group Del Ventura made his first recordings, issued on 78 rpm discs by Columbia and later reissued on CD in 2004, and toured extensively in Italy and abroad. Two of his bandmates from this period — trombonist Beppe Mojetta and guitarist Cosimo Di Ceglie — went on to their own documented careers in Italian jazz, and Mojetta's own biography independently confirms Del Ventura's presence in the Flemming band as its violinist.

Del Ventura left Flemming's group in 1934 to form his own orchestra, with drummer Dick Stauf, trumpeter Italo Scotti and pianist Giuliano Pomeranz. The group played Rome's Colibrì club in 1935, and, after adding Gianni D'Ovidio in 1936, was booked for a two-month residency at Turin's Hotel Ligure. That same year he also worked in Rotterdam alongside Eduardo Bianco's Orchestra Argentina di Tango. In 1937 he relocated to Ethiopia with Gaetano Franco's touring theatrical revue company, where he formed new groups and performed for many years, reportedly recording further material there that has not resurfaced. He did not return to Italy until 1976.

Del Ventura's musical career resumed only in 1988, when he recorded some sessions with guitarist Silvano Chimenti — confirmed independently on Chimenti's own biography, which records that "in 1988 he played with the great jazz violinist Americo Del Ventura" — alongside musicians named as Antonello Vannucchi, Giorgio Rosciglione and Sergio Conti. No commercial release from these sessions has been identified. He died in Rome in 1990, in poverty and largely forgotten; his earlier recordings have only begun to be reissued since.

Del Ventura's entire documented output sits inside the hot dance and early swing style that Italian orchestras played through the 1920s and 1930s — the same repertoire captured on the Riviera Jazz Records reissue anthologies that carry his sole surviving recordings, built from Duke Ellington-era swing standards, Charleston-tempo numbers and hot dance-band arrangements rather than any later jazz idiom. His own route into that music ran through Rome's silent-film cinemas, where he spent a decade playing live orchestral accompaniment before the Harry Flemming band gave him his first outlet for jazz proper; that background is reflected in his catalog's grounding in dance-orchestra arrangement rather than small-combo improvisation. As a bandleader from 1934 onward he continued in the same idiom, working hotel and club residencies in Italy and briefly the Netherlands before an extended, undocumented stretch of work in Ethiopia from 1937 to 1976.