Manlio Maresca is a guitarist and composer born in 1977 in Terracina, on the coast of Lazio, and Roman by adoption after building his career in Rome. He founded the instrumental trio Neo in 2001 with bassist Fabrizio Giovampietro and drummer Antonio Zitarelli, an avant-blues project whose self-titled 2002 debut Discogs tags as Math Rock, Post-Hardcore and Jazz-Rock. In 2010 the group, by then billed as Neo (27), toured the United States and recorded Neoclassico at Steve Albini's Electrical Audio studio in Chicago; the 2011 release carries Discogs' Avant-garde Jazz and Jazz-Rock tags. An earlier trio recording, Water Resistance (2009), carries the same pairing of tags.

Alongside Neo he formed Squartet in 2005, a group that toured Europe and released three albums on the Jazzcore Inc. label: Squartet (2005), Uwaga! (2009) and Adplicatio Minima (2015), all tagged Jazz and Rock on Discogs, with styles running from Free Funk and Noise to No Wave. He also played guitar on Udus's DooMooD (2007, FromSCRATCH) and on the Lhobo label's I Mostri release Uncle Ghost (2011), tagged Jazz and Avant-garde Jazz, and appeared on the various-artists compilation Il Seme (2009).

In 2012 he founded the trio Andymusic, which debuted accompanying poet, actor and writer Remo Remotti; the group's Heavydance (2014) was his first release on the Auand label, tagged Contemporary Jazz. By his own account he joined Massimo Nunzi's Orchestra Operaia the following year, an ensemble Discogs also credits him on guitar for on Orchestra Operaia (2016, Casa Del Jazz). His own biography names trumpeters Fabrizio Bosso and Paolo Fresu among the orchestra's guest collaborators, but neither appears in the Discogs credits for that specific release, so the claim is recorded here as bio-stated rather than independently confirmed.

2016 was his busiest recorded year. He released his leader debut, Hardcore Chamber Music (Auand), fronting the quintet Manual For Errors as guitarist, composer and producer, with alto saxophonist Daniele Tittarelli, trumpeter Francesco Lento, pianist Roberto Tarenzi, keyboardist Domenico Sanna, bassist Matteo Bortone and drummer Enrico Morello; Discogs tags the album Contemporary Jazz and Avant-garde Jazz. The same year he played electric guitar on Giovani Leoni 1's Nirvana (Casa Del Jazz), a jazz treatment of the Nirvana catalog that also credited baritone saxophonist Beppe Scardino, bassist Gabriele Evangelista, guitarist Francesco Diodati, trumpeter Fulvio Sigurtà, drummer Federico Scettri and guitarist Enrico Bracco, and he appeared on Auand's 50th-release sampler, Auand Family "50," alongside Evangelista, Diodati, Bracco, drummer Enrico Morello, bassist Francesco Ponticelli and alto saxophonist Gaetano Partipilo. In 2017 he played guitar on Riccardo Fassi Tankio Band's Frank Zappa tribute, Plays Zappa - The Return of the Fat Chicken (Alfa Music).

He relocated to Berlin in 2017. He has continued to record for Auand as a leader from there: Noisy Games (2020), composed, played and produced entirely by him, again with Tittarelli and Lento in the band alongside bassist Matteo Bortone and drummer Ivan Liuzzo, and tagged Contemporary Jazz. By his own account he has also led the noise and free-improvisation-facing project Manual For Errors Panic Solo in Berlin and worked within the city's jazz and experimental scenes. His guitar and electronics also appear on Andrea Scala's Coming Back, Leaving Again (2020, Shifting Paradigm Records, tagged Jazz and Fusion, with pianist Roberto Tarenzi again in the band), Electric Sheep Collective's Nope Hope (2022, tagged Jazz alongside Hip Hop and Folk, World, & Country) and Franzhoney Mother's Party's self-titled 2025 album (tagged Electronic and Jazz).

No Italian or English Wikipedia article, AllMusic entry, or Musica Jazz feature on Maresca could be found. All About Jazz has published one interview-format feature on him, "Manlio Maresca: L'imprevedibile gioco delle parti" ("The Unpredictable Interplay of Roles").

Across a Discogs-documented catalog of 26 release credits, twenty carry a Jazz genre tag, most often alongside Rock, and the recurring style pairing on his own records and his closest bandmates' work, Avant-garde Jazz with Jazz-Rock or Math Rock, describes his musical identity better than either label alone: an electric guitarist working the seam between contemporary/avant-garde jazz and the punk-hardcore and math-rock vocabulary his early bands (Neo, Squartet) were built on, released mostly through small Italian labels built for exactly that crossover (Auand, Casa Del Jazz, Jazzcore Inc., Lhobo). His two records as a leader, Hardcore Chamber Music (2016) and Noisy Games (2020), both on Auand and tagged Contemporary Jazz and/or Avant-garde Jazz, are the clearest statement of that identity, built around a consistent quintet of jazz-trained horn players and rhythm section. A smaller handful of his credits, chiefly with the folk-revival group Ardecore and the art-rock band Gronge, carry no Jazz tag at all and sit outside the jazz side of his output.