ROSE Ann Scamardella – the “Eyewitness News” anchor/reporter who was a local TV fixture in the ’70s and early ’80s – is coming back.

Scamardella will report for WNYW/Ch.5’s 10 p.m. newscast in a two-parter on Albanian refugees in Brooklyn.

The report will air next Tuesday and Wednesday.

Scamardella inspired Gilda Radner’s wildly popular “Roseanne Rosannadanna” character on “Saturday Night Live.”

Since leaving WABC/Ch.7 in 1983, she has kept a low profile, moving out to the suburbs to teach and raise her daughter, who’s now in college.

She was finally coaxed out of retirement by Ch.5 news director Susan Sullivan – who was an intern for Scamardella when Sullivan was in high school – and Rosanna Scotto, who co-anchor’s Ch.5’s 10 p.m. newscast.

“My father just passed away and Rose Ann came down and spent some time with me,” Sullivan said. “I hadn’t seen her since I’d been back [in New York] and we began talking about the [Kosovo] refugees.”

“I think it was just the right time for her, and she wanted to do it for Susan,” Scotto said. “I’ve known Rose Ann forever and I was trying to woo her into doing something with me.

“For years, all of us have been trying to get her to do something,” Scotto said. “She was moved by what’s happening with the Kosovo refugees, and the fact that a lot of them are now settling in Brooklyn, which is her hometown.”

Sullivan said Scarmardella spent time in Sheepshead Bay in Brooklyn with a family of about 14 refugees, documenting their plight.

“Rose Ann was thinking of her own grandparents, who came here from Italy for economic reasons, literally only with the clothes on their backs,” Sullivan said.

“Watching the tapes [of Scarmadella] I think she’s really back to who she was on the ‘Eyewitness News,’ which was as a real person relating so well to other people.

“These people’s English wasn’t so great, but there was Rose Ann, sitting comfortably at the dinner table.”