Pietro Iodice was born in Naples. By his own account, he started on organ as a child, guided informally by his harmonica-playing father, before switching to drums at 13 after selling a Vespa scooter to buy his first kit; he began formal lessons at 16 under teacher Antonio Golino, whose swing feel he later credited as a direct influence. He came up on the Naples and Caserta jazz circuit before relocating to Rome in 1988, where he quickly established himself as one of the city's most active jazz drummers.

In 1993, Iodice co-founded the Corvini-Iodice Roma Jazz Ensemble with trombonist Mario Corvini - a big band conceived, in Iodice's words, as a place for musicians to develop original material and grow through prestigious playing opportunities. The ensemble recorded Signor Jones (2000, Via Veneto Jazz), Homage to Yusef Lateef & Corvini-Iodice Roma Jazz Ensemble (2002, YAL Records, a live recording made at Teatro Metastasio in Prato and released in the United States) and Fast Race (2005, Brave Art Records), and was cited in Down Beat magazine. The band's personnel over the years included trumpeter Claudio Corvini, Mario Corvini's brother, and pianist Pino Iodice - Pietro's own brother, with whom he has performed for years in separate piano-and-drums projects, including together as the Pino Jodice Jazz Trio on Infinite Space (2018). Pino and Pietro Iodice are two distinct working musicians who share a surname and a family, not a single person or a name variant of each other; Pino is a pianist, composer and conductor (Discogs artist ID 671558), while Pietro is a drummer (Discogs artist ID 2904436), and the two should never be conflated in a discography. The Corvini-Iodice ensemble's lineage runs forward into the Parco della Musica Jazz Orchestra (PMJO), the resident big band of Rome's Auditorium Parco della Musica, where Iodice himself is Discogs-documented on drums on the orchestra's own live album, Jazzitaliano Live 2007 (Casa Del Jazz), alongside Claudio Corvini, Mario Corvini and much of Rome's working jazz-orchestra circuit.

Iodice's Discogs-verified session and combo work runs from 1993 to 2025 and spans nearly fifty credited releases. A long-running association with pianist and composer Riccardo Fassi's Tankio Band produced some of his most prominent recorded work: Serial Killer (2001, Splasc(h)), a big-band treatment of Ennio Morricone compositions featuring accordionist Antonello Salis and trumpeter Enrico Rava alongside Claudio Corvini, Mario Corvini and trombonist Massimo Pirone; Portraits of Interior Landscape (2017); Riccardo Fassi Tankio Band Meets Fabio Morgera (2016, Alfa Music), with trumpeter Fabio Morgera as composer, arranger and conductor; Plays Zappa - The Return of the Fat Chicken (2017), again with Salis, the Corvini brothers and Massimo Pirone, plus clarinetist Gabriele Mirabassi and alto saxophonist Paolo Recchia; and Cum Grano Salis (2025, Parco Della Musica Records), a large-scale orchestral collaboration between Fassi and Salis marking decades of the two musicians working together.

He is Discogs-credited on bassist Giovanni Tommaso's Third Step - Good Bye 900 (1998, Ricordi), a project recorded across four studios in Rome, New York and Lucca whose combined personnel credits also list Enrico Rava, Paolo Fresu, Joe Lovano, Danilo Rea, Rita Marcotulli, Flavio Boltro and fellow drummer Aldo Romano; Discogs lists these names at the release level without a per-track breakdown, so it is not established which specific tracks Iodice shares with which musician, only that all are credited on the same recording. With saxophonist Gavino Murgia he recorded two studio dates a decade apart, Megalitico 5tet (2009, Mankosa) and Blast (2018, Abeat Records), both grounded in Murgia's Mediterranean-inflected jazz idiom. In 2003 he appeared as an equal, co-billed member of a touring quartet on Seven Steps to Heaven (Wide Sound), alongside American guitarist Vic Juris, French bassist Dominique Di Piazza and pianist Giuseppe Continenza. In 2014 he was one-third of a working piano-less trio on Soul Eyes (Abeat Records, with saxophonist Giulio Martino and bassist Gianluigi Goglia), a program of standards and originals whose liner notes single out Iodice's drumming as "superlative," a steady and inexhaustible foil for Martino's lyricism.

Beyond his own credits, Iodice has performed at major Italian and European jazz festivals including Umbria Jazz, Bergamo Jazz and the Calvi Jazz Festival in Corsica, and appeared on RAI radio's jazz programming. He is also active as a jazz drum instructor. His own account of his early career places an association with Naples alto saxophonist Massimo Urbani before his move to Rome; this detail comes from Iodice's own retrospective interviews rather than a Discogs-documented recording, and is reported here as his own biographical account rather than an independently verified credit.

Iodice names Buddy Rich, Elvin Jones and Max Roach as his primary drumming influences, alongside the direct, personally transmitted swing feel of his first teacher, Antonio Golino; he has also spoken of a particular admiration for the big-band arranging of Thad Jones and Mel Lewis. That range shows up across his recorded work: propulsive hard-bop time-keeping on combo dates like Seven Steps to Heaven and Soul Eyes, big-band drive across three decades of Riccardo Fassi's Tankio Band and the Corvini-Iodice/PMJO lineage, and a more open, Mediterranean-jazz pocket on Gavino Murgia's two quartet and quintet dates. He has described Rome, where he has worked since 1988, as the most vibrant city for jazz in Italy.