He was eventually driven by debts to agree to write the official account of the visit of the Emperor Franz Joseph I of Austria in 1857.

Rovani was known for criticism of historical novels of the Romantic style, which were popular in Italy at the time and whose stereotypes and old fashioned plots he pointed out.

His historical novels, which begin with Lamberto Malatesta (1843), replace Romantic idealism with scepticism, and focus on the glamour and squalor of bohemian existence rather in the manner of operatic realism.

Together with Ippolito Nievo's Confessioni di un italiano, Rovani's Cento Anni had an important impact on the evolution of Italian novel.

Rovani had always been interested in the relations between the arts, and in the essays gathered in Le tre arti (1874) he theorized his ideas on synaesthesia.