Rosario Giuliani started young on alto saxophone with the "Città di Terracina" band, then went through formal training at the Conservatorio Licinio Refice in Frosinone, graduating with top marks in 1987. In 1989 he took courses at Berklee College of Music held as part of the Umbria Jazz Festival. By 1990, Italy's national broadcaster RAI had put a 23-year-old Giuliani into a "European Young Jazz Talents" orchestra performing in Rome under trombonist and composer James Newton.

In 1996, at 29, Giuliani won the Massimo Urbani Prize, Italy's most prestigious jazz honor, named for an alto saxophonist who had died three years earlier at 36. The following year his own quartet took both Best Soloist and Best Group at the Europe Jazz Contest in Belgium, and in 1999 he won the Premio Lo Straniero for Music. In 2000, Dreyfus Jazz signed him in France, and he also won Musica Jazz's "Top Jazz" award in the New Talent category that year.

The records followed on a steady clock through the 2000s and 2010s: Luggage (2001), Mr. Dodo (2002), More Than Ever (2004), Anything Else (2006), Lennie's Pennies (2010), Images and The Golden Circle (both 2013), The Hidden Side (2016), Duke's Dream (2017), and Love in Translation (2020), spread across Dreyfus Jazz, Parco della Musica Records, Via Veneto Jazz, and other labels. Musica Jazz named him Best Saxophonist of the Year in 2010, the same year he won a Jazzit Award; a second Jazzit Award for best alto sax followed in 2012.

Two records stand apart from that catalog. Duets for Trane (1998, Philology) strips away the rhythm section entirely: Giuliani and pianist Franco D'Andrea face nine John Coltrane compositions alone, sax and piano with nowhere to hide. Cinema Italia (2016, also circulated as Tension) turns the direction most Italian jazz players don't: instead of borrowing texture from film music, Giuliani runs Ennio Morricone, Nicola Piovani, Piero Umiliani, and Riz Ortolani's scores through a straight jazz quartet, treating them as a legitimate standards book the way an American player would work through the Great American Songbook.

Since 2013, Giuliani has taught jazz saxophone at the Jazz Department of the Conservatorio Santa Cecilia in Rome, one of Italy's oldest conservatories, and also teaches at the Saint Louis College of Music. In 2019 he was named Ambassador of Umbria in the World. He continues to tour and record, most recently with Live & Kicking (2024, with pianist Giovanni Mirabassi) and "Logbook" Live at Sounds (2024, with his own quartet).

Giuliani's alto tone is described by critics as "big, biting and burning," built on the bebop and post-bop lineage of Charlie Parker and John Coltrane, filtered through Cannonball Adderley, Eric Dolphy, Jackie McLean, and Art Pepper into a personal, disciplined voice rather than a copy of any one of them. That discipline is part of what makes his 1996 Massimo Urbani Prize notable: Urbani was a live-wire, self-destructive bebop talent, and Giuliani's playing is closer to control than combustion. His catalog also runs a genuine cross-genre thread, most visible on Cinema Italia, treating Italian film composers as jazz repertoire rather than incidental texture.