Francesco "Cicci" Santucci was born in Lanciano, in Italy's Abruzzo region, on April 21, 1939. He began trumpet lessons at 13 with a local band instructor, and in 1955 his family moved to Rome, where he made his public debut a year later at Italy's first national jazz festival, held at the Teatro Quirino. He kept studying formally alongside his early performing career, earning a conservatory diploma in 1969 from the Conservatorio Umberto Giordano in Foggia, and, in 1971, an arranging diploma from the Berklee College of Music in Boston. In a readers' poll conducted some years later by the magazine Jazz di ieri e di oggi, he placed fourth among Italian trumpet players.

Around 1957, a year after his festival debut, Santucci joined the Modern Jazz Gang, a Roman octet whose recorded work for RCA Italiana, Cetra and the independent label Adventure - including the 1960 releases Modern Jazz Gang, Modern Jazz Gang Quintet and Jazz In Italy N. 6 - is tagged by Discogs as Cool Jazz and Bop. Fellow members across these sessions included tenor saxophonist Enzo Scoppa, altoist and arranger Sandro Brugnolini, and pianists Leo Cancellieri and Puccio Sboto. Two years later Santucci and Scoppa, credited jointly as composers and performers, recorded Poeti Moderni Americani (1962, Istituto Internazionale Del Disco), a spoken-word-and-jazz record built around Allen Ginsberg and Frank O'Hara reading their own poems in English over the duo's original music, with actor Giancarlo Sbragia reading Italian translations - a historically notable document of the Beat-poetry-and-jazz vogue that briefly crossed the Atlantic into Italian recording studios.

In 1969 Santucci won the competition for principal trumpet of RAI's Light Music Orchestra, the Italian state broadcaster's in-house ensemble, a post he held for more than twenty years until he left in 1994 to concentrate on concert work. The role placed him inside RAI's substantial jazz-adjacent broadcasting activity as well as its light-entertainment mainstream: on May 23, 1973, he appeared as both trumpet soloist and one of several conductors on Jazz Concerto, a big-band program of original jazz compositions recorded at RAI's Rome auditorium and issued only for internal broadcast use. A 2009 commercial reissue of that recording, retitled Live In Rome 1973 (Jazz Lips), documents the full personnel: alongside Santucci, RAI Orchestra colleague Attilio Donadio on saxophone, pianist Franco D'Andrea, bassist Giovanni Tommaso, trombonists Dino Piana and Frank Rosolino, saxophonist Gianni Basso, trumpeter Oscar Valdambrini, and visiting Americans Tony Scott (clarinet, also a co-conductor) and Conte Candoli (trumpet).

Outside RAI, Santucci built a parallel and much longer-running identity as a jazz combo leader, almost always alongside Enzo Scoppa. Billed variously as the Quintetto Santucci-Scoppa, the Santucci Scoppa Quartet, the Complesso Santucci-Scoppa and simply "Santucci - Scoppa," the two led a working partnership documented on Discogs from Mondo Operaio and On the Underground Road (both 1971) through Honey (1996), Toward the Peace (2009) and Olimpiade (2025) - more than fifty years of intermittent but continuing recorded activity together. On the Underground Road (1971, Dire, produced by Piero Umiliani), tagged by Discogs as Soul-Jazz, Post-Bop and Cool Jazz, is the pair's best-documented session: it also carries pianist Franco D'Andrea, bassist Bruno Tommaso and percussionist Bruno Biriaco. Santucci also recorded twice with pianist Romano Mussolini: Jazz Allo Studio 7 (1962, Ricordi, issued as the Romano Mussolini All-Stars), which won Italy's jazz critics' prize for 1963, and Soft & Swing (1979, Carosello), on flugelhorn.

A self-released live document, credited "Cicci Santucci with Archie Shepp & Kenny Clarke" and drawn from sessions recorded in Rome in March and October 1975, places Santucci alongside two major American jazz figures at the Discogs credit level - a genuine, if informally circulated, recorded connection distinct from an unrelated and uncited claim, repeated across Italian Wikipedia and other biographical summaries, that Santucci also collaborated with Lionel Hampton, Gato Barbieri and Gil Evans. That broader claim could not be independently confirmed in this build's research: it appears in no dated, sourced account, and none of the three names turns up among Santucci's own Discogs-documented credits. It is reported here as circulating, unverified biography, not as an established fact; see the notes file for the full sourcing trail. Santucci's own concert history from the era is independently documented, however: he appeared at three major European jazz festivals - Comblain-la-Tour in Belgium (1961), Montreux in Switzerland (1967) and Juan-les-Pins in France (1969).

Alongside his jazz work, Santucci built a substantial career as a session and soundtrack trumpeter, recording for film and television composers including Armando Trovajoli, Riz Ortolani and Ennio Morricone. His best-known credit from this side of his career is the trumpet solo on Morricone's "Playing Love," recorded in July 1998 at Rome's Music Village studio for Giuseppe Tornatore's film The Legend of 1900; IMDb separately credits him to the production's music department. The piece has remained central to his later concert programming - he has performed The Legend of 1900's score repeatedly in Italian theaters into the 2020s - though the specific trumpet-soloist credit for the original 1998 soundtrack recording is not broken out in Discogs' own release data for that album, which lists only Morricone's own production credits; see the notes file for the full disclosure.

Santucci remains active. In February 2024 the Cicci Santucci Quintet performed at the Lanciano Jazz Festival in his home city, and in October 2025 he appeared, in his mid-eighties, at Bari's Teatro Van Westerhout with a quintet performing The Legend of 1900's music. The Lanciano-area cultural association Il Frentano d'Oro counts him among its honorees. No death record was found in this build's research.

Santucci's career runs on two parallel tracks that rarely touch directly. The Modern Jazz Gang years, the Ginsberg/O'Hara poetry record, and the five-decade Santucci-Scoppa partnership sit inside a straight-ahead, largely cool- and bop-descended small-combo idiom, with On the Underground Road (1971) showing a turn toward the contemporary soul-jazz and post-bop vocabulary that several of his RAI-era Italian contemporaries were also absorbing at the time. The RAI Light Music Orchestra post that supported him for a quarter-century, and the film and light-entertainment session work built on top of it, belong to a separate, larger world of Italian broadcast and studio professionalism - the same institutional current this campaign has traced through Attilio Donadio and Carlo Pes - and it is that studio-trumpet identity, not his jazz-combo one, that produced his single best-known recorded moment, the Morricone trumpet solo. Unlike Pes, whose combo jazz thinned to a late-career postscript, or Donadio, whose jazz period was front-loaded and gave way to library music, Santucci's own-name jazz partnership with Enzo Scoppa runs the full length of his career on both sides of the RAI years, which is the strongest evidence this build found that his jazz identity is a sustained practice rather than an early or occasional one.