Zucchi taught mathematics, rhetorics and theology as a professor at the Collegio Romano, and then was appointed as rector of a new Jesuit college in Ravenna by Cardinal Alessandro Orsini.

He received patronage from Ranuccio II Farnese, Duke of Parma, to which Zucchi dedicated his book Nova de machinis philosophia in 1642.

Niccolò Zucchi published many books on science, including two works on the "philosophy of machines" (analyses of mechanics) in 1646 and 1649, and Optica philosophia in 1652.

Some of the subjects Zucchi wrote about were magnetism, barometers (denying the existence of the vacuum), and demonstrated that phosphors generate rather than store light.

[5] One of the things cited by Zucchi in his 1652 book "Optica philosophia experimentis et ratione a fundamentis constituta" is his claim of exploring the idea of a reflecting telescope in 1616.

The French author Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle's 1700 work History of the Academy of Sciences stated Zucchi used it to observe "celestial and terrestrial objects".

The 1832 Edinburgh Encyclopædia noted Zucchi's use of a tilted mirror "must have distorted and spoiled the image"[10] and the 1858 Encyclopædia Britannica described Fontenelle's claim as "recklessly (ascribing) the invention"[7] Historian Al Van Helden notes in his The Galileo Project that the claims Zucchi used a reflecting telescope to observe Jupiter and Mars as "wildly improbable".