Born in Verona, he studied music at the Milan Conservatory from 1855 where he was a pupil of Stefano Ronchetti-Monteviti and, as scholar William Ashbrook notes, "where he struck up a lifelong friendship with Arrigo Boito, two years his junior" and with whom he was to collaborate in many ways.

With these pieces, both young men received entrees into Italian society, hence Faccio's association with Countess Maffei and the letters of introduction which followed which allowed both him and Boito access to Rossini in Paris in 1862.

Faccio returned to Milan to write his first opera, I profughi fiamminghi, which was based on a text by Emilio Praga and written for La Scala where it was presented on 11 November 1863.

The event included Boito's reading of the infamous "Ode saffica col bicchiere alla mano", which infuriated Giuseppe Verdi.

As Ashbrook notes, while its "innovatory libretto" was written by Boito, there was "dismay at the score's paucity of melody",[2] but he does add that Ophelia's funeral march, the "Marcia Funebre", "[won] general approval".

In 1871, after working as an assistant conductor under Eugenio Terziani[7] at La Scala, he was named as music director of that house which mounted a revised version of Amleto on 12 February that year.

[10] When Victor Maurel was planning to revive the Théâtre-Italien company at the Théâtre des Nations in Paris in 1883, it was hoped that Faccio would be chief conductor.

[13] In the end Gialdino Gialdini was engaged instead, with a young Arnaldo Conti as assistant conductor: Faccio only conducted four of the eight performances of Simon Boccanegra in Paris through the 1883-1884 season.

These included London on 5 July 1889[2] with Tamagno repeating his triumph as the Moor, and the Italian premiere of Richard Wagner's Die Meistersinger.

While in Denmark, he made a special trip to Elsinore and visited the Royal Castle where he had the feeling that at any moment one could imagine seeing the "wandering and troubled shade of the assassinated king.