Paolo Pellegatti was born in Milan on May 22, 1957, the brother of sports journalist Carlo Pellegatti, and picked up the drums at thirteen. At sixteen he began formal study with Enrico Lucchini at the Capolinea, Milan's best-known jazz club, and had his first professional engagements there alongside pianist Luigi Bonafede. At the Capolinea he also met and began working with Mario Rusca, Guido Manusardi, Claudio Fasoli and Giorgio Gaslini. His first international tour came at nineteen, with Luciano Biasutti's quintet in Bulgaria. He later attended Berklee College of Music in Boston, studying harmony and orchestration alongside drums, with vibraphone and piano as secondary instruments.

Discogs, which lists him as a single unambiguous entity (artist 1531149, profile text "Italian jazz drummer," name variations "P. Pellegatti" and "Paolo Pelegatti"), documents a drumming career built almost entirely as a sideman: 28 Appearance or TrackAppearance credits against two releases under his own name. The bulk of that session work runs through the two pianists and composers who anchor postwar Milanese jazz. He is a Discogs-confirmed member of the Giorgio Gaslini Octet and New Quartet, playing drums and percussion on Monodrama (1984), Skies Of China (1985) and Schumann Reflections (1984), all on Dischi Della Quercia, and later on Gaslini's 2013 anthology The Complete Remastered Recordings On Dischi Della Quercia. He recorded twice with pianist Enrico Intra, on The Blues (1991) and the live Nosferatu Live (1994, taped at the Iseo Jazz Festival), and once with guitarist Franco Cerri, on Cerri's Django Reinhardt tribute En Souvenir De Milan (1995). Italian-language biography also places him in Cerri's own working quartet from 1979 to 1996, a run of years longer than the single Discogs-documented studio date can itself confirm.

His association with alto saxophonist Massimo Urbani, one of Italian jazz's most celebrated postwar improvisers, is Discogs-confirmed on the 1980 single Dedication To A.A. & J.C. / Max's Mood (Red Record), recorded in Bologna with pianist Luigi Bonafede and bassist Furio Di Castri; the same recording was later folded into Urbani's posthumous 2018 Red Record retrospective. Pellegatti is also one of several drummers credited, on different tracks from different sessions, on the 1995 Philology anthology Invitation - he plays on four of its six tracks, while Enrico Rava appears on a fifth track recorded separately, so the two are documented on the same release rather than on the same date. He recorded with tenor and soprano saxophonist Claudio Fasoli as a member of the Claudio Fasoli New Quartet on Cloudy (1981, Palcoscenico Records), alongside pianist Luigi Bonafede and bassist Piero Leveratto, and with pianist Mario Rusca on the Mario Rusca Group's Recreations (1976). He is a Discogs-confirmed member of Bonafedegruppo Jazz, Luigi Bonafede's own group, on Locomotiva (1977), alongside Bonafede on piano and Lucio Terzano on double bass.

Further Discogs-confirmed drumming credits run from the Angelo Arienti Quintet's Sunday, April 2 (1978) and Five For Jazz's Live In Sanremo (1986) through the Porter-Praskin Quartet's Sonnet For Sal (1994, with the American tenor saxophonist Sal Nistico) and trumpeter Marco Tamburini's Trip Of Emotion (1996, with trombonist Slide Hampton), to the Gaspare Pasini Quartet's Philing (2008). Italian-language biography also credits performances and collaborations with Freddie Hubbard, Dizzy Gillespie, Chet Baker, Joe Lovano and Bob Berg; none of these appear in Pellegatti's own Discogs discography, so they are recorded here as sourced but session-unverified claims rather than confirmed dates.

From 1997 Pellegatti has led a series of formations under the banner Natura Mediterranea, recording the album of the same name that year with international guest musicians, a Mediterranean- and Latin-inflected leader project that Discogs tags Contemporary Jazz and New Age rather than straight-ahead jazz. In 2000 he co-founded the drum supergroup La Drummeria with Ellade Bandini, Walter Calloni, Maxx Furian and Christian Meyer. His second leader release, Pablito's Way (2012, Limen Jazz, the eighth volume of the label's Duets series), is tagged Fusion, Soul-Jazz, Smooth Jazz, Jazz-Rock and Jazz-Funk on Discogs. Discogs and his own biography both credit him with more than sixty albums in total as a drummer, composer and bandleader. He has taught at Milan's Piccolo Conservatorio Nuova Milano Musica, the Intona Rumori school in Venice, the Civici Corsi di Jazz in Milan and the Centro Jazz in Turin, and currently teaches at the "Nel Centro della Musica" academy in Cusano Milanino and the Antonio Vivaldi Conservatory in Alessandria.

Pellegatti's drumming grew up inside Milan's hard-bop and mainstream jazz mainstream, the working rhythm-section role he filled for Giorgio Gaslini, Franco Cerri, Enrico Intra and Mario Rusca across the 1970s, 80s and 90s, and it extended into the freer, more exploratory language of alto saxophonist Massimo Urbani, whose 1980 and mid-1990s sessions carry a harder, Free Jazz-adjacent edge on Discogs. As a leader from the late 1990s on, his own Natura Mediterranea and Pablito's Way projects turn toward a different vocabulary entirely, fusion, soul-jazz and smooth-jazz idioms built around Mediterranean and Latin percussion textures rather than the bebop-descended combo format of his sideman years.