Lino Patruno, born Michele Patruno in Crotone, Calabria, on October 27, 1935, is a jazz guitarist and banjoist who became the central figure of traditional jazz in postwar Italy while also building a long parallel career as a cabaret performer, actor and television host. He picked up a guitar for the first time in 1953, taught himself, and by October of that year was already playing in his first orchestra after his family had moved to Milan by way of Turin. In Milan he founded the Riverside Jazz Band in the mid-1950s and later led the Milan College Jazz Society, the house group he used for decades to back visiting American jazz musicians on record and in concert. Discogs lists more than 200 release credits under his name and its Milan College Jazz Society, Riverside Jazz Band, Ragtime Band, Dixieland Jazz, Jazz In Trio, American All Stars, European Jazz Stars and Red Pellini Gang billings, the great majority of them tagged Jazz, with Dixieland and Swing the dominant styles.

Patruno's core work is the Milan-hosted "American friends" record: leading his own Italian rhythm section behind touring or resident American swing and Dixieland veterans. He recorded and performed with Joe Venuti (Joe Venuti In Milan With Lino Patruno & His Friends, 1971, reissued as Welcome Joe! and Jazz Violin), Wild Bill Davison (Relaxin' In Milan With Wild Bill Davison, 1974), Billy Butterfield (Billy Butterfield Plays George Gershwin, 1978), Eddie Miller (Eddie Miller Live at Capolinea Vol. 1, 1979), Bud Freeman and Wingy Manone (Milan, May 24th, 1975), Jimmy McPartland and Dick Cary (Singin' the Blues, 1976), Ralph Sutton (25 Years After, 1976), Spiegle Willcox (Spiegle Willcox Rides Again, 1983), Albert Nicholas (Albert Nicholas in Milan, 1966), Bob Haggart (What's New?, 1988) and, later, the guitar summit of Bucky Pizzarelli, Frank Vignola, Howard Alden, Al Viola and Marty Grosz on Stringin' the Blues: A Tribute to Eddie Lang (Jazzology, 2003), recorded live at the Ascona jazz festival. He also toured and recorded with vocalist Rebecca Kilgore (It Had to Be You, Jazzology, 2009) and, on piano, with Romano Mussolini (The Wonderful World of Louis Armstrong, 1988; Hello Satch!, 2002). Scott Yanow's book The Great Jazz Guitarists includes Patruno, the only Italian guitarist in it. He is primarily a banjoist by reputation and specialty, though Discogs credits him on most of his own records on guitar as well as banjo, and occasionally bass and piano.

Alongside the jazz catalog, Patruno had a second, well-documented career as a cabaret and television performer. In 1964 he co-founded the satirical cabaret quartet I Gufi with Nanni Svampa, Roberto Brivio and Gianni Magni, a group credited with introducing French-style cabaret to Italy; it toured and recorded until 1969. After I Gufi broke up he continued to record and perform with Svampa and singer Franca Mazzola into the mid-1970s, on spoken-and-sung recital records and regional folk-song anthologies such as the multi-volume Milanese: Antologia della Canzone Lombarda, none of which is jazz. He became a familiar face on Italian television, four seasons as a regular on Enzo Tortora's RAI 2 variety show Portobello from 1977 (his sung theme for the program, "Portobello", was itself a chart item), and later as the host of several jazz-focused RAI and satellite programs, A Tutto Jazz (1990-91), L'Occhio sulla Musica (1993), Jazz on Sat (2002-03), Extrajazz (2003-04) and Jazz Me Blues (2005 onward). He acted in Federico Fellini's Amarcord (1973), Vittorio De Sica's Lo chiameremo Andrea (1972) and Carlo Lizzani's Mussolini ultimo atto (1974), scored the television spy series Guerra di Spie (1987), and co-wrote the screenplay and composed music for Pupi Avati's Bix (1991), a fictionalized life of Bix Beiderbecke that represented Italy at Cannes; a 1990 Jazzology release, Lino Patruno "Bix Memorial", and the 1998 record "Bix & All That Jazz" extend the same Beiderbecke interest into his recording career. He ran unsuccessfully for the Italian Chamber of Deputies on the Lista Marco Pannella ticket in 1992, taught the history of jazz at Rome's Università degli Studi Roma Tre from 2003, and received the Globo d'Oro della Stampa Estera in 2006. In 1985 he founded the touring ensemble the European Jazz Stars, and over the years he has organized or directed jazz festivals in San Marino, Ascona, on Etna and at Sirmione, among other venues, and represented Italy at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival in 2011.

Patruno remains active. He published the book Quando il Jazz Aveva Swing in 2009, and as of a July 2025 profile in the Italian press he was still touring with a big band under the banner "Lino Patruno Jazz Show," described there as a living legend of Italian jazz. He is based in Rome.

A note on a namesake: a different, unrelated Lino Patruno is an Italian writer and journalist (Wikidata Q3833090); nothing in this profile draws on that person's work.

Patruno's music sits in the American hot-jazz and Dixieland-revival tradition of the 1920s and 1930s: banjo and guitar rhythm playing built for a front line of trumpet, trombone and clarinet or saxophone, in the manner of Eddie Lang and the string players around Joe Venuti, whom he later celebrated directly with Stringin' the Blues: A Tribute to Eddie Lang. Rather than simply playing repertoire from that era, Patruno spent his career putting Italian house bands, chiefly the Milan College Jazz Society, in the studio and on stage directly behind the American originators of the style, from Wild Bill Davison and Eddie Miller to Bucky Pizzarelli's generation of guitarists decades later, which is the throughline Discogs' 200-plus release-relationship list for him documents most clearly. His parallel identity as a cabaret and television figure, most visibly through I Gufi's satirical folk-cabaret repertoire and his years as a RAI variety-show regular and host, drew on a different, non-jazz musical vocabulary (chanson, Milanese folk song, TV themes) and is treated in Italian sources as a genuinely separate strand of his work rather than a jazz side project; his jazz-press recognition (the Yanow book, four decades of Jazzology recordings, festival direction, a university jazz-history post) rests on the Dixieland and swing catalog described above.