Renzo Ruggieri was born in 1965 in Roseto degli Abruzzi, a coastal town in the Teramo province of Abruzzo. He began on standard accordion as a child under Aldo Rampa, then studied free-bass accordion with Vittorio Pomante, before turning to jazz proper: in 1993 he earned a jazz piano diploma from the Centro Professione Musica (CPM) in Milan, studying under pianist Franco D'Andrea. He went on to specialize in film composition with Ennio Morricone at the Accademia Musicale Chigiana in Siena (1991), in jazz accordion with the American accordionist Frank Marocco (1995) and with jazz historian Adriano Mazzoletti (1996), in jazz accordion again with French accordionist Richard Galliano (2000), in jazz harmony with Umberto Fiorentino (2002), and in arranging and composition for jazz big band with Mario Raja (2001).

Ruggieri became, by his own and multiple independent accounts, the first accordionist in Italy to teach jazz accordion, holding posts at the conservatories of Cosenza, Castelfranco Veneto and Nocera Terinese before his current position: he teaches Jazz Accordion at the Conservatorio Statale "Gaetano Braga" in Teramo, a course the conservatory itself describes as one of the first state-recognized jazz accordion programs in the world. He also founded a private music academy with its own recording studio and the label Voglia d'Arte Production, which has released his own catalog of albums, running from Duo (1990, with guitarist Giovanni Finizii) through Chansons (2026).

He was the first accordionist to release entirely improvised recordings, under the banner "Solo Accordion Project": Improvvisazioni Guidate (1998), Storie di Fisarmonica Vissuta (2005) and Live Improvisations (2016). His discography verified on Discogs is smaller than his full catalog, but it documents two directly Discogs-credited quartet and duo dates that connect him to other Italian jazz musicians: Spaghetti Time (2002), billed to the Renzo Ruggieri Group, pairs him with pianist Paolo Di Sabatino, double bassist Massimo Moriconi and drummer Massimo Manzi; and Inni d'Italia (2012), a duo billing with Di Sabatino on piano, adds vocalist Antonella Ruggiero and Roberto Colombo on vocoder to a set of instrumental arrangements of Italian patriotic hymns and popular songs. Inni d'Italia won the Orpheus Award for Best Jazz Accordion CD, an honor also given to his earlier album Collection (2009).

Ruggieri has performed more than 2,000 concerts internationally, in Russia, the United States, China, Brazil and across most of Europe, on stages including the Arena di Verona, the Shanghai Grand Theater, the Teatro dell'Opera di Roma, the Gnessin Hall in Moscow, the Rostov State Musical Theater and the Teatro Ariston in Sanremo. In 2009 the Castelfidardo International Accordion Festival awarded him its "Voce d'Oro" prize, previously given to Richard Galliano, Astor Piazzolla, Gorni Kramer and Art Van Damme; in 2013 the Gnessin Academy in Moscow gave him its Silver Disk; and in 2014 his handprint was added to the International Museum of Accordionists' Impressions in Castelfidardo. He has served as artistic director of the Castelfidardo International Accordion Award (PIF) and currently directs the Accordion Art Festival and Italia Award Festival, both of which he created.

His press biography also names Antonella Ruggiero, Sergio Caputo, Gianni Coscia, Tullio De Piscopo, Raphael Gualazzi, Roberto Gatto and Enrico Rava among his collaborators, and credits him with arranging "Souvenir d'Italia," performed by Antonella Ruggiero at the 2007 Sanremo Festival; none of these beyond Antonella Ruggiero's confirmed Inni d'Italia credit is independently corroborated at the Discogs credit level, so they are noted here as bio-sourced claims rather than verified connections.

Ruggieri's own leader catalog sits overwhelmingly inside a Discogs-tagged Jazz identity, but it is jazz built on an instrument whose repertoire habitually crosses into folk, tango and orchestral writing, and his discography reflects that: Inni d'Italia carries a secondary Folk, World & Country tag for its hymn-and-song source material, and his sideman and guest credits include a Finnish tango-and-polka session (Carnevale, 2015, Viivi Maria Saarenkyla, on which he is credited as arranger, recording engineer, mixer and mastering engineer) and a Bulgarian tango-jazz-Balkanpop date (Tango, Jazz & Balkanpop, 2012, Veronika Todorova Band). Two outlying guest credits sit outside jazz altogether on Discogs: a Brazilian bossa nova and samba session (Mistura de raca, 2008, Tiziana De Angelis) and a Czech folk record (Vlnobrani, 2013, Klara Smahelova), both single accordion or composer credits rather than part of his core catalog. His conservatory teaching title and both of his Orpheus Award wins are specifically for jazz accordion, and his "Solo Accordion Project" recordings apply full jazz improvisation to an instrument with few dedicated jazz improvisers in Italy at the time he began teaching it.