Francesco Lo Cascio is a Rome vibraphonist who began as a self-taught player, started formal vibraphone studies in 1982 and spent 1984 to 1985 at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, where Italian Wikipedia says he worked on technique with Ed Saindon. His own biography, published by the Terre Sommerse label, adds Gary Burton as a teacher there, with harmony under Waine Naus and arranging under Robert Rose. He came back to Italy in 1986, settled in Rome and has worked since as a freelancer and as leader or co-leader of a series of groups.

His first group was Silent Circus, founded in 1986 with the drummer Giovanni Lo Cascio (the sources do not say whether they are related) and active until 1995. Its album Silent Circus was recorded at Gulliver Master in Rome on March 8 and 9, 1988 and issued on Splasc(h) Records, with Michel Audisso on soprano saxophone, Massimo Fedeli on piano and Stefano Cantarano on bass; Lo Cascio composed "Mosca-Roma" and shared the credit on "Eccetera." Italian Wikipedia names the saxophonists Garzone and Bartz among his first collaborations, live and on record. The tenor saxophonist George Garzone is on two records with him through the pianist Marco Omicini's B.S.A.A., Beefless (Via Veneto Jazz, 1994) and Act Two (2000), and the altoist Gary Bartz is the featured guest on Return To Zero's Stairway to Heaven (MM Records, 1995). In 1994 Italian Wikipedia has him as a soloist under Gunther Schuller at the Italian premiere of Third Stream music at the Teatro Michetti in Pescara. He also played vibraphone and marimba on Riccardo Fassi's Tankio Band recording of Frank Zappa's music (recorded in May 1994, released 1995), with the guitarist Fabio Zeppetella, the trumpeters Claudio Corvini and Flavio Boltro and the accordionist Antonello Salis.

The Vibes Trio is the group most tied to his name. Italian Wikipedia dates the project to the mid-1990s and says he wanted a compact, classic lineup that would give room to the vibraphone's harmonic and melodic range; Wikipedia gives the trio as active from 1994, becoming a "New Trio" from 2003. The album Vibes Trio (Via Veneto Jazz, VVJ 013), dated 1997 by Italian Wikipedia, has the bassist Giovanni Tommaso and the drummer Roberto Gatto, with Stefano Di Battista as special guest on soprano and alto saxophone. It runs ten tracks, among them "Nardis," "Someday My Prince Will Come" and "W.C.Blues." In 1998 Italian critics named him one of the best new talents of Italian jazz in the annual Musica Jazz referendum (January 1998 issue).

From 2002 to 2005 he was in the Bruno Tommaso Jazz Workshop. The bassist-composer's album, for winds, rhythm section and a string quartet, Vento del Nord - Vento del Sud (Splasc(h), 2004, recorded March 2002) credits Lo Cascio on vibraphone and as composer of the sixth track, "Kitharaulos." He was the soloist in Charles Mingus's Epitaph under the musicologist Andrew Homzy at the Metastasio Jazz festival in Prato in 2003, and the guitarist Irio De Paula's Lembrando Wes Montgomery (Philology, 2004) is among his recordings from the same period. Italian Wikipedia says that from the early 2000s he turned mainly to improvised music while keeping his range.

The improvising work took form in a run of small groups. Air (Terre Sommerse) is a trio with the Portuguese saxophonist Alípio Carvalho Neto and the drummer Federico Ughi, recorded at ILR (Insugherata Live Recordings) in Rome on March 4, 2009: eight tracks, 52 minutes, all credited to the trio, with Lo Cascio on vibraphone and vocal percussion and doing the recording and mixing himself. Jazzitalia's review calls it eight pieces of rarefied, delicate sonority linked like a long suite, and Alias / il manifesto's Mario Gamba called it a free, delicate album with excellent dialogue. He co-leads the quartet Heimweh (Ragh Potato, 2010, with the clarinetist Alberto Popolla, the guitarist Alessandro Salerno and the drummer Mario Paliano), and the trio Domino with the clarinetist and saxophonist Marco Colonna and the bassist Lillo Quaratino, whose Domino's Tales (Slam Productions, released October 1, 2011) was recorded on May 28, 2010 at ILR and is built as ten tales, with compositions by each of the three. In 2009 he took part in a project of the improvising collective Franco Ferguson under the saxophonist John Tchicai, which produced Live at Moro Jazz Festival (2011), and in February 2013, on a British tour with Heimweh, he played in London with the London Improvisers Orchestra in a memorial for Butch Morris. Italian Wikipedia also lists the Lo Cascio-Fedeli Duo (since 1995), a duo called Old Passion (since 2010) and a duo called Sineddoche (since 2011). Separately, Discogs credits him with vibraphone on tracks 3 to 7 of Roberto Fega's electronic album Daily Visions (Creative Sources, 2012).

He has also become a recording and mixing engineer in Rome, working around ILR Studio. Discogs credits him with recording or mixing the violinist Emanuele Parrini's Are You Ready? Viaggio Al Centro Del Violino Vol. 2 (Rudi Records, 2014), Heimweh's Ragh Potato, and the Freexielanders' Looking Back, Playing Forward (Rudi Records, 2016, where he also plays vibraphone), plus mixing on Dardust's Birth (2016) and The Niro's un mondo perfetto (2023). He plays and edits on the Pasquale Innarella Quartet's Uomini di Terra (2012) and Migrantes (2017), and is the vibraphonist on the Luiz Moretto Quintet's Vampyroteuthis Infernalis (Slam Productions, 2015), where he co-wrote "Saturnia."

His most visible recent group is Roots Magic, the Rome group whose label, Clean Feed, describes its music as sitting between deep blues and creative jazz. After its 2021 appearance at the Jazz em Agosto festival, the quartet became a sextet with the multi-reedist Eugenio Colombo and Lo Cascio on vibraphone and percussion. He is a guest on its Take Root Among the Stars (Clean Feed, 2020), playing vibraphone on the first track and gong on the third, and a full member on Long Old Road (Retold Pasts And Present Day Musings) (Clean Feed, March 21, 2023), recorded in Rome in October 2022. The Free Jazz Collective's Guido Montegrandi reviewed it in June 2023 and noted that the enlarged lineup, with Colombo and Lo Cascio, offers a rich and varied sound.

Italian Wikipedia credits him with concerts in Italy, France, Switzerland, Austria, Great Britain, Hungary and Greece, and with second place among Italian vibraphonists in the Jazzit magazine Jazz Award for 2012. Terre Sommerse says he has appeared on RAI, SKY and Mediaset, and that he taught at the Jazz University of Terni, at Timba Saint Louis and at CIAC in Rome, and now gives private lessons in vibraphone and theory.

Lo Cascio describes an eclectic temperament in his Italian Wikipedia biography, which lists his range as European jazz and hard bop, "ethnic jazz," swing and free jazz. The Vibes Trio work sits in the mainstream tradition, with standards such as "Nardis" and "Someday My Prince Will Come" on its ten-track program. From the early 2000s his best-documented records are open improvisations: Air and Ragh Potato are credited to the groups, not to a single composer, and Domino's Tales divides its compositions among the three players. On the Roots Magic records the vibraphone is one voice in a sextet built on blues-derived material, which the group extends into free jazz; All About Jazz's Roots Magic review singles out his vibraphone for calling up flute and bass clarinet lines.

Beyond the mallets, Discogs lists percussion, vocal percussion and gong among his instruments. He recorded and mixed Air, mixed Domino's Tales, and recorded and mixed part of Ragh Potato.