Roberto Spizzichino was born in Rome on January 10, 1944. He trained formally in chemistry rather than music, and was a self-taught drummer: by age eighteen he was already teaching drums and working professionally. Through the 1960s and into the 1970s he built a career as a working jazz drummer on the Rome scene, a period in which Italian press and drum-trade sources describe him sharing stages with visiting American jazz figures including Dexter Gordon, Buck Clayton, Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis and Harry "Sweets" Edison, and playing in a trio led by pianist Amedeo Tommasi. None of these is backed by a Discogs recording credit, so they are reported here as consistently documented live-performance history rather than confirmed studio collaborations.

His Discogs-verified studio work from the same period is concentrated in two mid-1970s Roman jazz sessions. In 1974 he drummed on Romano Mussolini's Mirage (PDU), a soul-jazz and jazz-funk session also featuring alto saxophonist Glauco Masetti, trumpeter Emilio Soana, bassist Piero Montanari and percussionist Tullio De Piscopo. The following year he played drums on "Blues For Brandano," one track of Marcello Rosa's Friendship (King Universal, 1975), a session billed to the Marcello Rosa Jazz Ensemble featuring the American clarinetist Tony Scott, who was resident in Rome at the time; Enrico Pieranunzi plays piano elsewhere on the same record, though on different tracks from Spizzichino. In 1979 he drummed throughout Ugo Plays Calise (Fly Record), an instrumental jazz tribute album led by arranger Cicci Santucci under singer Ugo Calise's name, alongside trombonist Dino Piana, trumpeter Nini Rosso and Romano Mussolini again on electric piano.

Alongside this jazz work, Spizzichino was active as a session drummer on Italian pop and rock records of the same decade: he drummed on the Roman folk-rock group Grosso Autunno's self-titled 1976 album, on "'Na Tazzulella 'E Cafè" from Pino Daniele's 1977 debut Terra Mia (also later collected on the 1986 compilation Musica Musica), and is credited as a co-writer, not a drummer, of "Tu Donna Mia," recorded by the group Panorama on two singles in 1976 and 1980. Pino Daniele has no jazzprofiles.com profile in any vault checked, so his name appears here without a link.

From the late 1970s, Spizzichino built a second career that eventually eclipsed his playing credits in renown. He spent roughly four years in cymbal research and development for the Pistoia-based manufacturer UFIP, where he designed the multicolored "Tiger" series. Starting in 1977 he began trying to recreate the sound of the vintage Turkish-made K Zildjian cymbals, whose original Istanbul factory had closed; by 1980 he was hand-forging his own B20 bronze cymbals under the "Spizz" brand, and after leaving UFIP in the mid-1980s he continued independently under his own "R. Spizzichino" name. In 1991 he relocated his workshop to Pescia, in the hills near Pistoia in Tuscany, where he hand-lathed and hand-hammered cymbals one at a time; by his death he had made fewer than 3,500 of them. His cymbals became sought after worldwide among jazz drummers seeking the "old K" sound, with endorsers including Joey Baron, Peter Erskine, Adam Nussbaum, Dave Weckl and Billy Higgins, and after 2002 he also expanded into orchestral cymbals used by major symphony orchestras. Roberto Spizzichino died of leukemia in Pescia on November 21, 2011, at the age of 67.

Spizzichino's playing sits in the mainstream swing-to-bop tradition he absorbed firsthand from touring American musicians in Rome, and his two fullest studio credits show the range of where that language could go in 1970s Italy: the soul-jazz, Fender Rhodes-driven groove of Romano Mussolini's Mirage, and the clarinet-led post-bop and modal writing of Marcello Rosa's Friendship, recorded alongside Tony Scott. Ugo Plays Calise places him in a horn-driven, big-band-adjacent instrumental format built around tributes to American songbook and swing figures. Outside jazz proper, his session drumming on Grosso Autunno's folk-rock and Pino Daniele's blues-inflected Neapolitan songwriting shows a working Roman session player's range beyond the jazz clubs. His later and more widely felt influence on the music, though, ran through instrument-making rather than performance: his cymbals were built specifically to recover a sound - the dry, complex "old K" Zildjian tone - that jazz drummers of his generation had heard disappear from the market, which is why his clientele was overwhelmingly drawn from jazz rather than rock or pop percussion.