Silvia Manco started piano at six in Casarano, a small town in Italy's Lecce province, in the Puglia region, and earned her diploma at the Conservatorio di Lecce. At nineteen, pursuing jazz specifically, she moved to Rome and enrolled at the Universita della Musica, and in 1998 she took part in the SienaJazz seminars, the summer program that has trained a large share of Italy's working jazz musicians. Her first professional credit predates her recording career: she was the house pianist for the 1999-2000 theatrical season of "Due ore sole ti vorrei" at Rome's Teatro Sistina, where she also composed the song "Chi e di scena."

She formed her own trio in 2002, and it won the "Porsche Jazz" prize in 2006. Two years later her original composition "Ntartey" won best jazz composition at the Piacenza Jazz festival, and in 2021 she took first prize in the third edition of the national "Note di Donna" competition for best jazz composition by a woman, again with "Ntartej" (the title appears in sources both as "Ntartey" and "Ntartej"). Her debut album as a leader, Big City Is For Me (2007, Micca Club Records), moved through 1960s, beat and bossa nova territory across ten original and standard tracks. Afternoon Songs followed on the Nuccia label in 2010, produced by drummer Roberto Gatto, who also played drums on the session alongside saxophonist Daniele Tittarelli, bassist Dario Deidda, guitarist Fabio Zeppetella and trumpeter Giovanni Falzone - all Discogs-confirmed personnel.

In 2012 she released Casa Azul, a set drawn from Mexican and wider Latin American song repertoire (Maria Grever, Tomas Mendez, Consuelo Velazquez among the writers covered), framed around the world of painter Frida Kahlo, with tenor saxophonist Maurizio Giammarco a credited guest. Her best-known and most internationally distributed record is Hip! The Blossom Dearie Songbook (2019, Parco Della Musica Records), billed to Manco alongside American bassist Dezron Douglas and drummer Jerome Jennings, with trumpeter Enrico Rava and saxophonist Max Ionata as the album's two credited guests, reinterpreting the songbook of the American pianist-singer Blossom Dearie.

Her session discography runs through a recognizable circle of Rome-based jazz musicians: she is the pianist on Roberto Gatto's own Nino! (2016), a tribute to Italian actor and singer Nino Manfredi, and she plays piano on the Max Gazze recording of "Il Cielo" on the 2013 various-artists tribute Dalla in Jazz, again alongside Gatto and alongside saxophonist Daniele Tittarelli. She also appears on the 2015 two-disc Billie Holiday centenary tribute Hunger and Love and on the 2008 various-artists soundtrack compilation Caffe Roma - The Italian Soundtrack. Alongside her jazz work, she has toured and recorded as a pianist in Italian pop music, including Massimo Ranieri's 2009 tour and Arisa's 2010 Sanremo Music Festival appearance, and worked in theater with actor Giorgio Albertazzi - commercial and theatrical engagements that run alongside, rather than displace, a jazz catalogue centered on her own trio and quartet, two national composition prizes, and session dates with Gatto and Rava.

Manco's own working format is the piano-and-vocal trio, a lineage she places explicitly alongside the small groups led by American singer-pianists Shirley Horn, Nat King Cole and Blossom Dearie, and she has named pianists Ahmad Jamal, Bobby Timmons, Abdullah Ibrahim and Horace Silver as touchstones for her playing. Her choice of repertoire, from 1960s/bossa-nova material on her debut to an entire album of Mexican and Latin American song on Casa Azul to a full Blossom Dearie songbook, runs consistently toward vocal-jazz songbook projects built on a specific source or theme rather than a conventional mixed-standards set.