He was born in Quistello, in the province of Mantua and graduated in 1929 in Florence, with a thesis on Jacopo Bassano (supervisor Giuseppe Fiocco).
He constantly recalls the ancestry from the Vienna School and from the thought of Alois Riegl but he is also a very up-to-date scholar, attentive to phenomenology and structuralism.
[5] The last monograph ( Venice birth of a city) of 1978 represents the culmination of over thirty years of research (after the book on San Marco of 1946) and is still an essential work today.
The fund includes 3,800 books, about forty periodical titles; about 5000 extracts and a core of the degree theses of which he is supervisor.
The corpus of documents mainly concerns the disciplinary fields of late antique, medieval and Byzantine art, with particular focus on the art of the countries of the Balkan area, in particular Albania, Dalmatia, Greece and Bulgaria, which Bettini traveled for a long time during the study campaigns.