Following his studies at the acting school of the Piccolo Teatro in Milan and collaborations with Ermanno Olmi in cinema, Maurizio Scaparro in theater and with the Biennale di Venezia and the Teatro alla Scala, Maccarinelli began his career as to director at the age of 22. He has worked with important Italian actors including Maddalena and Giovanni Crippa, Massimo De Francovich, Johnny Dorelli, Rossella Falk, Massimo Ghini, Remo Girone, Anna Maria Guarnieri, Alessandro Haber, Francesca Inaudi, Marina Malfatti, Mariangela Melato, Giovanna Mezzogiorno, Valeria Moriconi, Umberto Orsini, Ugo Pagliai, Maria Paiato, Giuseppe Pambieri, Massimo Popolizio, Elisabetta Pozzi, Anna Proclemer, Stefania Sandrelli, Gianrico Tedeschi and Pamela Villoresi. His over one hundred performances fall mainly into three categories: Italian and foreign contemporary theatre, adaptations of classical texts, and tragedies by Euripides, six of which he staged at the Greek Theatre of Syracuse and the Olimpico in Vicenza. He has directed many shows with young graduates of the Silvio d'Amico Academy and the Experimental Film Centre, including Romanzo di Ferrara, Troilo > Cressida and Esposizione universale. He is to consultant for Mikado film and director of the Massenzio Literature Festival. He founded Artisti Riuniti in 2004 and, as the company's artistic director, realizes multidisciplinary projects exploring the intersections between theater, cinema and literature. He has received numerous prestigious awards.

After studying at the Silvio d'Amico National Academy of Dramatic Art, he made his theater debut with Vittorio Gassman in Jean Anouilh's Ornifle. Over the course of his long career, he worked with some of the most important names on the theatrical scene: Franco Zeffirelli, Edmo Fenoglio, Evi Maltagliati, Tino Buazzelli, Mila Vannucci, Lucia Catullo, Vittorio Sanipoli, Maria Fabbri, Carlo Bagno, Giancarlo Sepe, Giuseppe Patroni Griffi, Valeria Moriconi, Egisto Marcucci, Giancarlo Cobelli, Guido De Monticelli, Piero Maccarinelli, Carmelo Rifici, Serena Senigaglia, Furio Bordon, Giuliana Lojodice, Massimo Luconi, Luca Zingaretti, Piergiorgio Piccoli, Franco Branciaroli, Antonio Calenda, to name a few.

In 1990 he began his long artistic relationship with Luca Ronconi, first at Teatro Stabile di Torino, then at Teatro di Roma and finally at Piccolo di Milano. She participates to many of his plays including O'Neill's Strange Interlude, Kraus's The Last Days of Mankind, von Hofmannsthal's The Difficult Man, Shakespeare's King Lear, towards Peer Gynt from Ibsen, Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, Giordano Bruno's Candelaio, Marina Cvetaeva's Phoenix, Euripides' Bacchae, Thucydides' Memoriale from , Enzo Siciliano's Pericles and the Plague, Schnitzler's Professor Bernhardi, Goldoni's The Fan, Broch's Invented from Sane, Massini's Lehman Trilogy. For the big screen he starred in Pasolini, un delitto italiano by Marco Tullio Giordana, Le mani forti by Franco Bernini,Onorevoli detenuti by Giancarlo Planta, La vita altrui by Michele Sordillo, Il manoscritto del principe by Roberto Andò, La Grande bellezza by Paolo Sorrentino. In 2004 she was part of the cast of the film Ovunque sei accanto to Stefano Accorsi and Barbora Bobulova. Between 2008 and 2010 he played the Old Man in Romanzo criminale - La serie directed by Stefano Sollima, and in 2009 he starred in the drama Boris. Among his many awards are the Armando Curcio Prize in 1990, the UBU and Le Fenici Prizes in 1991, the E. Flaiano Prize and Nanni Moretti's Sacher d'oro in 1994, the Salvo Randone Prize in 2000, and in 2006 again the UBU Prize, the Italian Critics' Prize, the Veretium Prize in Borgio Verezzi, and the Olimpici del Teatro Prize. In 2019 he was awarded the Ennio Flaiano Lifetime Achievement Award.

A graduate of the Bottega Teatrale in Florence where he had as masters Orazio Costa Giovangigli, Vittorio Gassman and Giorgio Albertazzi, he has tackled a vast repertoire of classical and contemporary authors, both Italian and foreign, participating, to date, in more than sixty shows produced by major Italian public and private theaters. He has been directed among others from Vittorio Gassman, Luca Ronconi, Marco Tullio Giordana, Roberto Andò, Andrea De Rosa, Pietro Carriglio, Gabriele Lavia, Giuseppe Patroni Griffi, Mario Missiroli, Gianfranco De Bosio, Glauco Mauri, Piero Maccarinelli, Memè Perlini, Walter Pagliaro, Werner Schroeter, Saverio Marconi, Mauro Avogadro, Massimo Luconi, Cesare Lievi, Luca De Fusco, Leo Muscato, Antonio Calenda, Marco Sciaccaluga, Andreé Ruth Shammah, Pascal Rambert. Among the many roles he has played are Hamlet, Antony in Antony and Cleopatra, Macbeth, Herzen in Stoppard's The Shore of Utopia, Orestes in Euripides'Oresteia, Guglielmo from Baskerville in the stage reduction of The Name of the Rose, the Master in Testori's I promessi sposi alla prova. A multiple nominee for the Ubu and Olimpici/Le Maschere awards, he received the Randone Award in 1999, Theatre Critics Award in 2002, the Eschilo d'oro in 2008, the Danzuso Award in 2014, the Veretium Award in 2012, and the Franco Enriquez Award in 2018. From 2011 to 2015, he directed the Versiliana Festival.