Massimo Manzi was born in Rome in 1956. His family later moved to Alatri, and in 1976 relocated again, first to Osimo and then to Senigallia, on Italy's Adriatic coast. He was a self-taught drummer as a child, then enrolled at Rome's Scuola Popolare di Musica di Testaccio while completing a classical secondary education (liceo classico). He worked drumming jobs in Senigallia's dance halls, including the seafront venue Rotonda a Mare, and sharpened his technique at workshops held during Ravenna's "Mister Jazz" festival series, where he studied with Max Roach, Elvin Jones, Peter Erskine, and Jack DeJohnette.

He entered Rome's music scene in the 1970s with the bands The Magicians and UT, then in 1979 recorded drums on Raffaele Mazzei's album Dentro Edipo (Divergo) and toured for about twenty dates with the Marche region's jazz-rock band Agorà, until it disbanded in 1980. In the early 1980s Manzi joined double bassist and composer Bruno Tommaso's big band, the Marche Jazz Orchestra, performing at major Italian festivals including Ancona Jazz 1981 and appearing on Rai Radio 3's "Un certo discorso: il lavoro del musicista." At Ancona Jazz through the 1980s, visiting American soloists repeatedly called on Manzi to back them, including Al Cohn, Tal Farlow, Al Grey, Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis, Bobby Watson, Jimmy Knepper, Mike Melillo, and alto saxophonist Massimo Urbani; Manzi is the credited drummer on Urbani's posthumously released Live In Ancona At Strabacco '84 (Philology, recorded November 27, 1984), alongside bassist Marco Cempini and pianist Carlo Gargioni. Manzi began teaching in the 1980s as well, and later worked as a clinician and product demonstrator for drum and cymbal makers including UFIP, Sonor, and Tamburo Drums.

In 1988 Manzi joined a quartet led by bassist Paolino Dalla Porta alongside Antonello Salis and reedman Riccardo Luppi. The following decade brought heavy touring in Spain, where Manzi worked regularly with Carlo Morena and Paolo Ghetti at Barcelona's Cova del Drac and Madrid's Café Central, and where he helped bring over Italian colleagues including Paolo Fresu, Roberto Rossi, Flavio Boltro, and Maurizio Giammarco for dates broadcast on Spanish television. In 1994 he recorded on rapper Frankie hi-nrg mc's home-recorded version of "Omaggio, Tributo, Riconoscimento" (RCA), a rare excursion outside jazz alongside his 1989 credit on the CGD rock album Reds by the band Gang. His most consequential 1990s relationships both began in this stretch: in the second half of the decade he started working with Lee Konitz, recording L'Age Mür (Philology, 1997) as part of the Konitz/Enrico Rava Quartet and five further albums with the saxophonist, and in 1998 he recorded Live From Virginia Ranch (Philology) with Franco D'Andrea, a session credited to the Rosario Giuliani Quartet featuring D'Andrea that also put Manzi alongside altoist Rosario Giuliani; it opened a partnership that carried Manzi into the Franco D'Andrea Trio for eight further albums into the mid-2000s. In 1999 he joined Furio Di Castri in Richard Galliano's Italian Trio for a roughly twenty-date tour of Japan that included a week of nightly sets at Tokyo's Blue Note.

Manzi issued his first album under his own name, Quasi sera (Wide Sound, 2000), backed by Paolo Di Sabatino, Fabrizio Bosso, Massimo Morganti, Samuele Garofoli, Pasquale Innarella, Stefano Micarelli, and Luca Bulgarelli; the album does not currently appear in Discogs's database (see the notes file for how this was checked). Through the 2000s his name appeared on roughly twenty Renato Sellani Trio releases on Philology, plus a string of co-authored dates on the same label: Flashback (2002, with Rava, Gianni Basso, Stefano Bollani, and Ares Tavolazzi), Four for Jazz (2004), and Gershwin! (2007, Renato Sellani Trio & More featuring Rava and vocalist Tiziana Ghiglioni). From 2003 he served as artistic director of the Gubbio No Borders festival. His concert calendar in these years included an appearance with Pat Metheny at the 30th Ravenna Jazz festival, a booking at San Juan's Heineken Jazz Festival, and, in 2005, dates at New York's Birdland sponsored by Umbria Jazz.

His most prominent billed date came in 2007 with Identita' (Wide Sound), released under the name Massimo Manzi Project and pairing him with bassist Paolino Dalla Porta, vibraphonist Andrea Dulbecco, and American saxophonist David Liebman, recorded September 27, 2006 at Cavo' Studio in Azzano San Paolo. Two years later, in 2009, Philology producer Paolo Piangiarelli put Manzi behind the kit for tracks 1 and 2 of pianist Yakir Arbib's debut leader album Yakir Portrait, paired with bassist Massimo Moriconi as one of three rotating Italian rhythm sections Piangiarelli assembled for the young Israeli pianist's first record. The same year, Manzi recorded Nineteen Plus One (Astarte) with Kenny Wheeler and the Colours Jazz Orchestra, and appeared, pictured on the front cover, on the Riccardo Fassi/Roswell Rudd Quartet's Double Exposure (Wide Sound).

Manzi's discography now runs past 150 credited releases on Discogs alone, and he has continued recording steadily into the 2020s, including dates with organist Vito Di Modugno's various groups and saxophonist Felice Clemente's trio and quartet. In 2012, readers of the Italian magazine JAZZIT voted him the country's best drummer in the publication's annual poll.

Sources on Manzi, including Flavio Caprera's Dizionario del jazz italiano (2014), describe him as one of Italian jazz's most personal stylists and one of its most versatile, moving fluently across the music's different idioms rather than settling into a single school. That range shows in the company he has kept: a bebop- and swing-rooted drummer for Renato Sellani's trio and for visiting American mainstreamers like Jimmy Knepper and Al Cohn, but flexible enough for the more open, conversational post-bop of Lee Konitz and Enrico Rava's quartet, Franco D'Andrea's harmonically adventurous trio, and one-off dates with modernists like Roswell Rudd and David Liebman. His technique was shaped directly by workshop study with Max Roach, Elvin Jones, Peter Erskine, and Jack DeJohnette, four drummers who themselves span several eras and approaches to the instrument, and that eclectic grounding is consistent with a career built almost entirely as a first-call sideman for Italy's Philology, Splasc(h), and Wide Sound labels rather than around a single working band of his own.