Roberto "Bob" Salmieri was born on May 23, 1958, in Rome, into a Sicilian family whose branch had emigrated to Tunisia in the early 1900s; that paternal history in Tunis put him in contact with Middle Eastern culture from childhood, and it has shaped nearly everything he has recorded since. From 1979 to 1985 he directed L'Alambicco, an experimental theater and music association, before turning his main energy to a project that would run for the next three decades.

In 1995 he founded Milagro Acustico, a multiethnic ensemble he has led ever since, recording across Italy and the United States. Its signature move was setting traditional Arab-Sicilian poetry to music: Rubaiyyat Of Omar Khayyam (2004), Poeti Arabi Di Sicilia (2005), Siqiliah Terra D'Islam (2007), and Sicilia Araba (2013) all draw on that repertoire, and all of them carry a plain "Folk, World & Country" genre tag on Discogs rather than a jazz one. In 2013 Salmieri founded his own label, Cultural Bridge, to release his own work and that of other world-music, jazz, and experimental artists.

The turn toward a more explicitly jazz-facing project came in 2016, when Salmieri founded Erodoto Project with keyboardist Alessandro De Angelis, a quartet-to-quintet named after Herodotus and built around Mediterranean myth and migration. Its debut, Stories - Lands, Men & Gods (2017, Cultural Bridge), was followed by Molòn Labè (Come And Get Them!) (2018), which reviewer Sammy Stein described in Something Else! as carrying "phenomenal" saxophone work in "a marriage of jazz, Eastern and Latin sounds," and which includes a track named "Blues For Tony Scott," a nod to the American jazz clarinetist who built his own career fusing jazz with Asian and Middle Eastern music. Both albums carry a Discogs "Jazz" genre tag, with Contemporary Jazz, Latin Jazz, and Smooth Jazz among the listed styles. A third Erodoto Project record, Mythos - Metamorphosis (2020), paired the band with the Mirò string trio on a suite inspired by Ovid's Metamorphoses; it carries liner notes from Adam Baruch, artistic director of the jazz strand of Warsaw's Singer's Warsaw Jewish Culture Festival, where the piece was presented, and is Discogs-tagged Jazz (Contemporary Jazz, Latin Jazz, Cool Jazz).

In 2021, during the pandemic, Salmieri formed a new group, the Bob Salmieri Bastarduna Quintet, releasing ...E Mamma Faceva La Danza Del Ventre (2021) and Ma Sister Jumps Through Fire (2023), both self-released through Cultural Bridge. His most recent and most explicitly jazz-branded statement, A Single Multitude - The Jazz Side (2025, Cultural Bridge), was reviewed by the Italian jazz outlet doppiojazz.it as a mature, jazz-centered work built on hard-bop and Debussy/Bill Evans-adjacent harmony merged with Arab maqam scales, moving between quartet and quintet lineups of Italian and international musicians. The same year, Salmieri published, with Leonardo Lodato, Enciclopedia Dei Sassofonisti: Dalle Origini Del Jazz Ai Giorni Nostri, a 464-page reference work profiling 275 saxophonists, favorably reviewed by Jazzitalia.net for its "profound knowledge of jazz history." He has also published four novels drawing on Sicilian and Mediterranean themes, and performs regularly on Rome's jazz-club circuit, including Alexanderplatz Jazz Club, both as a leader and as a guest.

Salmieri's catalog splits cleanly into two periods with two different genre identities, and the split is real rather than cosmetic. His long-running Milagro Acustico project (1995-2015), built on Arab-Sicilian sung poetry, is consistently Discogs-tagged "Folk, World & Country," never Jazz, across every release checked. Everything he has released since founding Erodoto Project in 2016, by contrast, carries a Discogs "Jazz" genre tag, with recurring Contemporary Jazz, Latin Jazz, and Cool Jazz style tags, and is reviewed as jazz by independent critics: Something Else! called Molòn Labè a "marriage of jazz, Eastern and Latin sounds" built on "phenomenal" saxophone playing, and doppiojazz.it placed his 2025 album A Single Multitude - The Jazz Side squarely in a post-bop and hard-bop lineage, citing echoes of Benny Golson and a Debussy/Bill Evans-adjacent harmonic language, with the Arab maqam material folded in as a secondary color rather than the album's organizing logic. His own reference book on the history of jazz saxophone, published in 2025 and reviewed by Jazzitalia.net as demonstrating deep knowledge of the music's history, points the same direction: a musician who identifies his own project, in its most mature and best-reviewed form, as jazz first. He plays Rome's Alexanderplatz Jazz Club circuit and has had work presented on the jazz strand of Warsaw's Singer's Warsaw festival, rather than exclusively on the world-music festival circuit his earlier Milagro Acustico catalog would suggest. Documentation of his catalog remains genuinely thin outside these sources: his newest album and his two Bastarduna Quintet releases are not yet catalogued on Discogs, and no All About Jazz review or Musica Jazz feature could be independently confirmed beyond his own musician listing page.