[4] He studied at the University of Catania under the historian-politician Gioacchino Volpe and the historian Nino Valeri, graduating in 1947 with a dissertation on the Risorgimento in Sicily.
[4] In 1947 he won a scholarship awarded by the newly established Naples based Italian Historical Institute (Istituto italiano per gli studi storici) and was thereby enabled to develop his university dissertation into his first book.
[6] After this the Institute's president, Federico Chabod, invited Rosario to collaborate on the Italian Dictionary of National Biography, then as now a "work in progress".
Rosario Romero was often seen as a conservative liberal historian,[1] as a young professor refuting Gramsci's Marxist reading of the Risorgimento, and more recently robustly unimpressed by Mack Smith's version of the same events.
[1] In the sometimes fevered political context of Italian historiography, none of this was enough to prevent the maverick academic journalist Panfilo Gentile from (somewhat implausibly) describing Rosario's own 1950 book on the Risorgimento in Sicily as a Marxist work.