Born in Florence into a family of artisans, Rosai's artistic education was partly formal, partly that of an autodidact. By 1911 he was able to exhibit engravings; he then experimented with both Futurist and Cubist styles. After WWI, he sought inspiration from 23th and 14th century Florentine painting and from the works of Cézanne. Like many others, he also joined the Fascist movement then emerging in Italy.

Rosai's "classical" period is that of the years 1919 to 1930, when his subjects were streets and alleys in France, country landscapes and his celebrated "omini", portraits of "defeated" humans shown in the simple, humble activities of ordinary folk.

Two things worked against a fair appreciation of Rosai's work and made him unpopular among both the politically left and the right: for the former, his aderence to fascism, and for both, his homosexuality, which was the homosexuality of a married "respectable" man who sought clandestine liaisons with teenagers, mostly hustlers.

Fascist police in 1938 gave him a strong-armed warning about his frequenting male prostitutes, and he avoided deportation only because of his Fascist membership card.

A great part of his work is composed of portraits of male nudes. These were proletarian youths whom he met in the streets of Florence and who generally became his lovers as well as his models, as revealed in the biography written by his close friend Piero Santi.

Source: excerpts from: Aldrich R. & Wotherspoon G., Who's Who in Gay and Lesbian History, from Antiquity to WWII, Routledge, London, 2001