Roberto Revoltella studied at the Faculty of Medicine in Padua, where he graduated with highest honours; after specialising, he went to New York at the invitation of Professor Zoltan Ovary, where he won a Fulbright-Hays scholarship to do his doctorate at New York University and the Public Health Research Institute founded by Fiorello La Guardia.
He returned to Italy in 1972 as a researcher at the CNR, at the Institute of Cell Biology in Rome, where he worked for a long time with Rita Levi Montalcini; until 1987, when he moved to Pisa as director of the Institute of Mutagenesis and Differentiation at the CNR.