[2] In 1964 Luciano Maiani received his degree in physics and he became a research associate at the Istituto Superiore di Sanità in Italy.

[3] In 1976 Maiani became a professor of theoretical physics at the University of Rome,[3] however he traveled widely during this period, holding visiting professorships at the École normale supérieure of Paris (1977)[3] and CERN (1979–1980 and 1985–1986).

At the end of 2007 he was proposed as president of Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, but his nomination was suspended temporally after he signed a letter criticizing the rector of 'La Sapienza' University in Rome, who invited Pope Benedict XVI to give a lectio magistralis in 2008.

In 1970 he predicted the charm quark in a paper with Glashow and Iliopoulos which was later discovered at SLAC and Brookhaven in 1974 and led to a Nobel Prize in Physics for the discoverers.

Working with Guido Altarelli in 1974 they explained that the observed octet enhancement in weak non-leptonic decays was due to a leading gluon exchange effect in quantum chromodynamics.