Cesare Mangiocavallo was born in 2000 and started on violin and piano at six before switching to drums a year later, at seven. His teachers over the following years read like a cross-section of the current generation's top working drummers: Andrea Nunzi and Greg Hutchinson first, then Roberto Gatto, Colin Stranahan, Antonio Sanchez, and Mark Guiliana - a lineage repeated consistently across his own submitted biography and independent festival-program write-ups. In 2014 he won a scholarship to The Collective School of Music in New York, and he later graduated in jazz drums from Rome's Santa Cecilia Conservatory, the same jazz-drums program Gatto has chaired.

He made his first record in 2017, "The Dark Side of the Trio," a trio session with Luigi Mangiocavallo and Pietro Ciancaglini on which he played drums and composed - a self-released credit that predates any Discogs indexing of his work. From there he built a working career across several Rome-scene formations, drumming for bandleaders including Domenico Sanna, Daniele Tittarelli, Francesco Fratini, Roberto Tarenzi, saxophonist Diego Bettazzi's quartet, and Gabriel Marciano's quartet, alongside stretches backing Vittorio Esposito's and Simone Sansonetti's own trios and quartets at Premio Mario Guidi and Young Jazz Festival-linked concerts in 2024 and 2025.

The turning point came in 2019, when pianist Enrico Pieranunzi called him to play trio and quartet dates. That relationship reached record stores in 2022 with "Cantare Pieranunzi" (Alfa Music), a vocal-jazz project pairing Neapolitan singer Valentina Ranalli's new lyrics with Pieranunzi's own compositions; Mangiocavallo's drum credit on the release is independently confirmed at the Discogs credit level. The partnership continued past that one record: in 2024 he recorded and toured "Heroes" (Abeat Records) as the drummer in the Aldo Di Caterino Ensemble, again with Pieranunzi as featured guest pianist, and also composed the album's track "Stretch" - another Discogs-verified credit, this time as both performer and composer. The group was still playing the record together as of December 2024, when it closed out the 22nd Jazzset festival at Acquaviva delle Fonti's Teatro Luciani.

Mangiocavallo's other 2020s work has run in several directions at once. He drums on "Introducing Wasted Generation" (2023, GleAM Records), the debut album by the young Rome quintet Wasted Generation (Iacopo Teolis, Gabriel Marciano, Vittorio Solimene, Giulio Scianatico), a free-leaning contemporary-jazz record that drew a review from All About Jazz - also a Discogs-confirmed drum credit. In a different register, he plays baroque timpani and other orchestral percussion in various classical productions; one of those, "The Italian Scotsman" (2023, Da Vinci Classics, with Francesco Barsanti and Ensemble Aqua Felix), carries his own Discogs credit as mixing and mastering engineer rather than as a performer, a genuinely non-jazz classical/Baroque release included here for completeness rather than as jazz work. He has also composed an electronic album, "White Noise Mountains" (2020), and plays in the trio Three Peaks, whose 2022 single "At First We Arrived" (Alfa Music) came with a music video he wrote, directed, and edited himself - none of these three additional releases could be located on Discogs and are sourced instead to Mangiocavallo's own biography and press write-ups, per this project's standing approach for a thinly-Discogs-documented emerging artist.

He has performed at Umbria Jazz, Casa del Jazz, and the Fano Jazz Network, as well as in Rome's jazz clubs. Alongside music, he has pursued filmmaking since childhood: in 2018 he wrote and directed the feature "Siegfriedsdorf Dixieland Band," presented at the Italian Senate for Giornata della Memoria in 2020 and named best film at the Rome Prisma Awards, and he has written, directed, and edited several award-winning music videos.

Mangiocavallo's drumming sits inside the same modern-mainstream, piano-trio-and-quartet vocabulary that defines his principal employer Enrico Pieranunzi's own catalog - conversational, harmonically alert accompaniment rather than a soloist's showcase - but his stated teacher list (Colin Stranahan, Antonio Sanchez, Mark Guiliana, alongside veteran Roberto Gatto) points toward the more elastic, post-Motian/DeJohnette language those players are each known for. His work with Wasted Generation, described by All About Jazz as a "free contemporary jazz" project built on melodic exploration and avant-garde improvisation, shows a different, looser side of the same drummer. Two further, non-jazz threads run alongside his combo work: orchestral session credits on baroque timpani and other classical percussion, and a parallel practice as a self-taught filmmaker and composer of electronic music.