Active mostly in his native city of Naples, he also painted throughout Italy, including a stay in Parma.

[1] He appears to have been baptized on February 15, 1722, in the church of Santa Maria dell'Incoronatella in Naples under the name Gasparro Giovanni Battista Pascale Traversa.

He was a contemporary of other Solimena pupils, Giuseppe Bonito (1707–1789), also a genre painter, and Francesco de Mura (1696–1784).

Traversi's satirical paintings typically depict animated groups of bourgeois protagonists that seem compressed physically into an indoor pictorial space that can barely contain them.

Although he had no pupils, his influence was significant, and can be seen in the works of Lorenzo de Caro, Giuseppe Bonito and Orazio Solimena.