Attilio Donadio was born in Cuneo, Piedmont, in 1925. He began his jazz activities in the postwar Italian Hot Club scene, coming up alongside a generation of Italian jazz players that included future broadcaster Piero Angela, composer Piero Umiliani and drummer Franco Mondini. Through the late 1940s and into the mid-1950s he worked in the dance-hall and studio orchestras of Bruno Canfora, Gorni Kramer and Armando Trovaioli, and played in the Sestetto Italiano (Italian Sextet) alongside tenor saxophonist Gianni Basso and trumpeter Oscar Valdambrini - the same duo whose own quintet would soon become the defining working unit of postwar Italian jazz.

Donadio's clearest surviving jazz credentials date from 1960, when he recorded on two landmark sessions in the same year. He plays alto saxophone on the Basso-Valdambrini Octet's New Sound from Italy (Jolly Hi-Fi), an album now regarded as a milestone of modern Italian jazz. The same year, in a quartet led by bassist Giorgio Azzolini with trombonist Dino Piana, he recorded three American jazz standards - "Bag's Groove," "All the Things You Are" and "There Will Never Be Another You" - for Cetra's Jazz in Italy N. 1, playing alto saxophone, baritone saxophone and clarinet. He continued to appear on record with the extended Basso-Valdambrini circle - the Quintetto Basso-Valdambrini and, from 1967, the Basso-Valdambrini Sextet - across a run of singles and LPs that stretched from 1960 to 1967.

After a period working in Switzerland's radio orchestra and further work for Italian Radio, Donadio formed his own Confidential Quartet and became a regular at Milan's storied Capolinea jazz club, performing there alongside pianists Guido Manusardi and Mario Rusca. In the 1970s he joined RAI's stable orchestra, the broadcaster's in-house ensemble, where he worked alongside fellow reed and brass players including Oscar Valdambrini, Gianni Basso, and Dino and Franco Piana. On May 23, 1973, he recorded Jazz Concerto with the Orchestra della RAI Radiotelevisione Italiana at RAI's Rome auditorium, a big-band program of original jazz compositions ("Jazz Theme Variations," "Opus Jazz," "Jazz Tarantella" among them) issued only for RAI's internal use. That same month, he was part of the RAI ensemble backing visiting American musicians Tony Scott, Frank Rosolino and Conte Candoli at a concert in Rome - the same Jazz Concerto session, commercially reissued in 2009 as Live In Rome 1973, whose full personnel also independently confirms fellow soloist Cicci Santucci and pianist Franco D'Andrea and bassist Giovanni Tommaso, found while building Santucci's own profile in this vault. His obituaries additionally reported that over the years he had performed alongside visiting American headliners including Chet Baker, Benny Goodman, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and Gerry Mulligan - a claim consistent with the RAI orchestra's broader, well-documented role backing touring American stars on Italian broadcasts of the era.

As a RAI staff musician, Donadio's work also ran through the broadcaster's light-entertainment and pop side: Discogs-documented session credits place him behind singers Sergio Endrigo, Orietta Berti, Gigliola Cinquetti and Gino Paoli, behind the Italian pressing of Connie Francis's "Many Tears Ago," on Carmine Coppola's Italian-release score for The Godfather Part II (1975), and on Pino D'Angiò's disco hit "...Balla!" (1981). Over the same decades he also directed several dance and big bands, including the Capolinea big band in the early 1980s, the Big Swing Orchestra in Trento, and a big band in Pergine in the 1970s.

From the mid-1970s Donadio built a parallel career as a leader of saxophone-led mood and production-music records for radio, television and film use - Sax & Stars Vol. 2 (1974, Phase 6/Vedette, credited to "Attilio 'Anthony' Donadio"), Jazz Descrittivo (1979, Usignolo Edizioni Musicali), Saxorama, Themes for Saxophones, Holiday for Saxs (1985) and Sax For Sex (1985), followed later by the compilations 18 Golden Sax Hits (1991) and Big Band Classics Vol. 3 (1996, Intersound, with Jerry Mengo). Jazz Descrittivo in particular became a fixture of Italian broadcasting: its cues were used for years as background music on RAI television's monoscopio (test-card) sequences, making it part of the sonic furniture of Italian TV. This library-music catalog makes up the majority of his output as a credited leader, distinct from his earlier work as a jazz combo player.

Donadio was well regarded by his peers. Bandleader and arranger Giampiero Boneschi, with whom he also recorded, said of him that he was "insatiable in wanting to always learn new things" and possessed "decidedly superior qualities" as an arranger and as a first-alto performer. Jazzitalia.net, Italy's dedicated jazz portal, ran a retrospective feature on him in its "Quella sera con..." series, and the archive of Milan's Saint Louis jazz school lists him among the protagonists of Italian jazz history. Attilio Donadio died of a heart attack at his home in Milan on September 17, 1999, at the age of 74; his death was reported by wire services through Italy's major newspapers.

Donadio's own discography splits cleanly into two periods. The first, running from the late 1940s through the mid-1970s, is straight-ahead jazz: Hot Club-era swing, the postwar Sestetto Italiano, and - most substantially - seven years (1960-1967) as a recurring session voice in the Basso-Valdambrini orbit, the hard-bop-leaning unit built around Gianni Basso and Oscar Valdambrini that produced New Sound from Italy and a run of quintet and sextet recordings still reissued today. His 1960 quartet date for Cetra's Jazz in Italy series, built on American bebop repertoire ("Bag's Groove," "All the Things You Are"), and his 1973 big-band session with the RAI orchestra both sit in this same tradition. The second period, from the mid-1970s onward, is dominated by his own catalog of saxophone-led easy-listening and library-music LPs made for broadcast and production use - work that is honestly a different genre from the jazz combo playing of his earlier years, even though several of these releases carry a "Jazz" tag on Discogs. Across both periods he was known as a versatile reed player, moving between alto and baritone saxophone and clarinet, and as a skilled big-band arranger.