Luca Aquino came to the trumpet late and by himself. He was born in Benevento, in Campania, on June 1, 1974, and did not start playing until he was nineteen, working mainly without a teacher. He then set music aside to finish a master's degree in economics, and returned to the horn because of Miles Davis and Chet Baker records. By the time his first album as a leader appeared he was thirty-three, roughly the age at which many Italian players are already a decade into a professional career.

That album was Sopra Le Nuvole, released on Emarcy in 2008. The follow-up did the real work. Lunaria (Universal Classics & Jazz, 2009) is a fifteen-track record with two guests who signalled the company Aquino was starting to keep: the American trumpeter Roy Hargrove on "Nuvola grigia," and the singer Maria Pia De Vito on "No Casualties." Musica Jazz made it Disco del Mese and gave Aquino its Top Jazz award as the best new talent in Italian jazz.

From there his catalogue took on the shape it still has, organised less around repertoire than around rooms. Amam, also 2009, was recorded with the group The Skopje Connection inside the old hammam in Skopje, North Macedonia. Icaro Solo (2010) is a solo record for trumpet, voice, live loops, and electronics, taped live in the Church of Saint Augustine in Benevento, with cover art by the painter Mimmo Paladino, who would go on to make the artwork for several more of his records. In 2016 Aquino made three trips to Jordan, settled on the acoustics of Little Petra, and returned with the Jordanian National Orchestra to record Petra on the site itself. The album premiered there on July 23, 2016 and was released worldwide that August under UNESCO's #Unite4Heritage campaign. He went back to Jordan in 2022 to work in the Roman theatre at Gadara. At home he founded and directs Riverberi, a festival in Benevento whose organising idea is the natural acoustics of historic buildings.

His international profile was built in parallel, and largely outside Italy. In 2012 he joined the quartet of the French drummer Manu Katché, taking over the trumpet chair from the Norwegian Nils Petter Molvær, and stayed for two albums: Live in Concert (ACT, 2014), recorded at the New Morning in Paris with Tore Brunborg and Jim Watson, and Unstatic (2016). He also worked with Jon Hassell. Closer to home, 2011's Chiaro came out on Tǔk Music, the label run by Paolo Fresu, and paired Aquino's trumpet and loop station with a Norwegian rhythm section and a guest appearance by Lucio Dalla on voice and clarinet. Four years later he used the same label for OverDOORS, a Doors tribute for trumpet, live electronics, guitar, bass, drums, and rotating guest singers including Petra Magoni and Rodolphe Burger. In 2017 the Dutch instrument maker Hub van Laar built him a signature trumpet model.

In July 2017 Aquino set out on the Jazz Bike Tour, an attempt to ride more than 4,000 kilometres from Benevento to Oslo and play 40 concerts along the way, each conceived as a site-specific project with local musicians and institutions, and run to the Europe Jazz Network's Green Rider environmental standard. During the tour he contracted Bell's palsy, an acute paralysis of the seventh cranial nerve, which is the nerve a brass player's embouchure depends on. He did not play for more than a year and rebuilt his technique from something close to zero, with daily physiotherapy; his own account records two consecutive injuries to that nerve and a recovery completed in 2019.

The record on the other side of it was Italian Songbook (ACT, 2019), recorded that March: Ennio Morricone, Nino Rota, Luigi Tenco, Lucio Dalla, and Fabrizio De André, played with Danilo Rea at the piano, accordionist Natalino Marchetti, and the Orchestra Filarmonica di Benevento, arranged and conducted by Giovanni Francesca and co-produced with ACT's founder Siegfried Loch. In 2021 Aquino cut the duo album Amore Bello with pianist Giovanni Guidi over two days in January at the Cicaleto studio in Sargiano. His most recent album as a leader, Lunaria 2 (Parco della Musica Records, 2024), returns to the title that made his name fifteen years earlier; it was recorded at the Casa del Jazz in Rome in November 2023 with Giovanni Francesca on electric guitar, Marco Bardoscia on bass, and Gianluca Brugnano on drums and electronics.

Alongside the playing he has directed the Pozzuoli Jazz Festival and Bari Jazz, composed for film including Sergio Castellitto's Fortunata (2017), and teaches jazz trumpet at the Conservatorio Santa Cecilia in Rome.

Aquino's stated starting points are Miles Davis and Chet Baker, the two players whose records pulled him back to the trumpet after he had stopped. What he built from them is a warm, lyrical, unhurried sound rather than a virtuoso one, usually placed forward in the mix and often processed: a loop station and live electronics are as much a part of his instrument as the flugelhorn, and appear on records from Icaro Solo through Lunaria 2.

The more distinctive trait is architectural. Aquino treats the acoustic behaviour of a physical space as compositional material, and a striking number of his records name the place they were made: a hammam in Skopje, a church in Benevento, a Nabataean site in Jordan, a Roman theatre at Gadara. The festival he founded is called Riverberi, Italian for reverberations, and is programmed around the same premise.

His repertoire runs wider than most Italian trumpet catalogues of his generation. Alongside original writing he has recorded a full album of Doors material, and cites The Doors, AC/DC, and Jefferson Airplane among his reference points; Italian Songbook works through Italian film composers and singer-songwriters; the Katché quartet years put him in a European chamber-jazz setting; and Did You Hear Something? (Leo Records, 2013) is entirely improvised.