Pietro Leveratto is a Genoa-born double bassist, composer and arranger who has worked across the Italian jazz scene since the late 1970s. Discogs credits him under the name Piero Leveratto (also indexed under his full first name, Pietro, and as "P. Leveratto"), and his own biographical statements agree on 1959 as his birth year in Genoa and 1977 as the year of his first recording. His earliest documented studio work on Discogs is drums-adjacent rhythm-section work from the late 1970s: he plays bass on Luigi Bonafede's 1978 trio date Esasperazione and, by 1981, is co-billed as one of five names on singer Tiziana Ghiglioni's debut Lonely Woman (Dischi Della Quercia), a modal-jazz session with tenor saxophonist Larry Nocella, pianist Riccardo Zegna and drummer Luigi Bonafede.

The 1980s put him at the center of several long Italian jazz partnerships. He is the bassist on Giorgio Gaslini's Octet album Monodrama (1984) and on Gaslini's Schumann Reflections (1984) and Skies of China (1985), and he joined pianist Guido Manusardi's working trio and quartet, recorded on Outstanding - Live in Tirano (1986) and, two years later, on the Chiavenna promotional LP Canzoni Per Una Valle, where Lee Konitz guests on alto saxophone. In 1987 he was the bassist on Stefano Battaglia's leader debut Things Ain't What They Used To Be, recorded at the Barigozzi Studio in Milan with drummer Gianni Cazzola, and the same year he appears on Claudio Fasoli's Quintet album For Once, having already recorded Fasoli's Cloudy (1981) with pianist Luigi Bonafede and drummer Paolo Pellegatti. In 1988 he was the bassist on the Arrigo Cappelletti-Roberto Ottaviano Quartet's Samadhi and, the same year, on saxophonist Roberto Ottaviano's own Sotto Il Sole Giaguaro alongside Battaglia and drummer Ettore Fioravanti, and he co-founded, with Cazzola, the Italian Repertory Quartet, whose sole album, Italian Repertory (Gala Records), also features pianist Marcello Tonolo and saxophonist Jacopo Jacopetti.

The 1990s brought a second wave of steady associations. He recorded three of his own co-billed dates - Alliance (1993, with saxophonist Pietro Tonolo, trombonist Roberto Rossi, pianist Riccardo Zegna and American drummer Joe Chambers), a quintet session for Piero Odorici's Plays Kurt Weill (1993, with trumpeter Eddie Henderson), and Maurizio Giammarco's ballads album Love Ballads (1999, with pianist Art Lande and drummer Roberto Gatto). He is the bassist on both volumes of Enrico Pieranunzi's Trio series recorded in the mid-1990s, Trioscape (1995) and Live in Germany (1996), and on the 1997 session Ma L'Amore No, on which the Pieranunzi Trio and singer Ada Montellanico are joined by Lee Konitz and Enrico Rava. In 1991 he co-founded the Bansigu Big Band in Genoa with trumpeter Giampaolo Casati, who took over its leadership; the orchestra's Now We Can (2001) features guest soloists Paolo Fresu, Rava and Gianluigi Trovesi, and its Bansigu Big Band With Lee Konitz (2004) brought Konitz back as featured soloist. Leveratto also recorded, in 1997, on the quartet Changes' sole album Small Changes (Splasc(h)), alongside pianist Stefano Battaglia, tenor saxophonist Emanuele Cisi and drummer Fabrizio Sferra.

His 2000s work runs from further Pieranunzi Trio dates, Multiple Choice (2000, with drummer Marcello Di Leonardo) and the expanded Evans Remembered sessions (2000-2001, adding trumpeter Fabrizio Bosso, saxophonist Rosario Giuliani and clarinetist Gabriele Mirabassi), to his own co-billed and duo records: Retrò (2000, EGEA, with saxophonist Pietro Tonolo, guitarist Bebo Ferra and accordionist Luciano Titi), Trio "Live" (2003, Splasc(h), with guitarist Lanfranco Malaguti and drummer Gianmarco Lanza), Un Pò Come...Noi (2003, a piano trio with Dino Massa and Claudio Borrelli), ...With Care (2004, with pianist Michele Franzini and drummer Massimo Manzi), the voice-and-bass duo Intimate Conversation (2004, Abeat, with singer Marilena Paradisi) and Accabbanna (2005, EGEA), the group he built around Sicilian singer Olivia Sellerio to rework Sicilian folk material in a jazz setting, with saxophonist Gaspare Palazzolo, Casati on trumpet and pianist Mauro Schiavone. He is also the bassist on Marcello Tonolo's Giampaolo Casati Trio album Novo (2010) and on Dimitri Grechi Espinoza's leader debut Artistic Alternative Music (2005). A duo album with singer Beppe Castellani, Interplay, was recorded in New York in 1998 but not released until 2025, on Maxy Sound, as the Castellani-Leveratto Duo - decades after the session, and after Leveratto's bass credit had already turned up, apparently misspelled "Piero Laveratto," on an earlier Castellani record from the early 1990s.

He has continued to record steadily since. He is the bassist on Mauro Negri's Plays Ellington-Gershwin (2003), on singer Cristina Zavalloni's Idea (2006, with clarinetist Mirabassi, bassist Antonio Borghini, drummer Cristiano Calcagnile and trombonist Gianluca Petrella), and, in Fasoli's long-running Samadhi quartet, on A Long Trip 22 (2025, Parco della Musica Records), alongside pianist Michelangelo Decorato and drummer Marco Zanoli - a working relationship with Fasoli that spans more than four decades of his discography, from Cloudy in 1981 to that same group's latest record.

Alongside performing, Leveratto teaches Composition for the jazz course at Rome's Conservatorio Santa Cecilia, after earlier teaching posts that included the La Spezia conservatory and Siena Jazz's summer courses; several younger Italian bassists cite him as a teacher or masterclass instructor, among them Giacomo Papetti, Giulio Corini and Francesco Ponticelli, all self-reported study credits rather than recording credits. He has also built a parallel career as an author: his nonfiction book Con la Musica - Note e storie per la vita quotidiana (Sellerio) pairs pieces of music with everyday moods, and his novel Il Silenzio Alla Fine, a historical mystery set in the early 1930s, marked his fiction debut.

Leveratto's catalogue reads as a career built on trio and quartet interplay rather than a single fixed style. His earliest dates sit inside the modal and post-bop language of Genoa and Milan's jazz-club circuit (Ghiglioni's Lonely Woman, the Gaslini Octet records), and his long tenures with Pieranunzi's piano trio and with Claudio Fasoli's various quartets - stretching from the free-leaning Cloudy in 1981 to the Samadhi quartet's A Long Trip 22 in 2025 - show a bassist equally comfortable in mainstream, standards-based settings and in more open, exploratory ones. His own co-billed and duo records lean toward song: Accabbanna sets Sicilian folk repertoire in a jazz frame, Intimate Conversation and Interplay are voice-and-bass duo records built entirely around vocalists, and Retrò is a small-group session with an accordion in the front line. Across it all, Discogs' genre and style tags for his discography run almost uniformly Jazz, tagged Contemporary Jazz, Modal or Post-Bop depending on the date, with a single Jazz-Rock tag on the 2003 trio date Un Pò Come...Noi.