In Parma, he was helped early on by Alberto's uncle, the painter and manuscript illuminator, Antonio Pasini, who painted for the local nobility and collaborated with the publishing house established by Giovanni Battista Bodoni.

By 1852, he exhibited a series of thirty designs, made into lithographs, depicting various castles around Piacenza, Lunigiana and Parma.

The eruption of the Crimean War offered a new opportunity, when in February 1855, this latter painter recommended Pasini to replace him on the entourage of the French plenipotentiary minister Nicolas Prosper Bourée [fr] to Persia.

He exhibited at Paris: The Druze attack a Maronite Village, Falcon hunt in plains of Ispahan, The Bazaar of Istambul, and The stage of the caravan, found in the Museum of Parma.

Gubernatis quotes the contemporary art critic, Virgilio Colombo, as saying of his paintings:[5] Pasini faithfully reproduces the architectural accessories, which sparkle in the sun and bathe in the blue shadows: in this, he is unrivaled and shows extraordinary ingenuity to create huge paintings in small canvases.

What skill in painting finger-high figures, fine horses, grim and thoughtful knights, with sumptuous trappings, damask-decorated weapons, kiosks, markets and menageries, saddles encrusted with gems, the turbans, the fabrics, the courtesans of princesses, the military camps, the intimate recesses of the harem, the profiles of city with jagged spires and minarets, and the hunts through the interminable space of the plains.