Pietro Lussu was born in Rome on March 21, 1971, and began studying classical piano as a child before turning to jazz at sixteen under Roman pianist Massimo Rustico. He spent a year at the Jazz University in Terni studying with American pianist Mike Melillo and attending seminars with Maurizio Giammarco, Paolo Fresu and Bruno Tommaso, then continued at the Siena Jazz seminars under Stefano Battaglia and Enrico Rava. He is the grandson of Emilio Lussu, the Sardinian anti-fascist writer and politician, and Joyce Lussu, the writer, partisan and translator; though born and based in Rome throughout his career, he has described Sardinia as still feeling like home through that family connection.

In September 1997, Lussu's quartet with alto saxophonist Rosario Giuliani took first prize out of sixty entrants at the Europe Jazz Contest in Brussels, with Lorenzo Tucci on drums; the win is documented on the contest's own compilation, Europ' Jazz Contest Belgium 97' (19th Jazz Hoeilaart International), released the following year. Several web biographies of Lussu round this to 1996, but the Discogs-dated compilation and this site's own already-published Rosario Giuliani and Joseph Lepore profiles both place the contest in September 1997 (see notes.md). Lussu has played in Giuliani's quartet since, appearing on Connotazione Blue and Flashing Lights (both 1999), Mr. Dodo (2002), Logbook, Live At Sounds (2024), the co-led Tribute to Bird (2021, an album marking the Charlie Parker centenary) and Giuliani's 2026 sextet record Brassing.

Alongside the Giuliani quartet, Lussu built a long-running parallel career inside Bari-born producer Nicola Conte's Schema-label acid-jazz and nu-jazz world. His first date there was the Schema Sextet's Look Out (Tribute To Basso/Valdambrini) in 2000, a session recorded for Conte alongside Rosario Giuliani (alto saxophone), Gianluca Petrella (trombone) and Fabrizio Bosso (trumpet), playing the book of the 1960s Basso-Valdambrini Quintet. He went on to appear across a run of Conte albums, including Other Directions (2004), Rituals (2008), Nicola Conte and Spiritual Galaxy's Let Your Light Shine On (2018) and Umoja (2023), and also co-led the LTC trio with bassist Pietro Ciancaglini and drummer Lorenzo Tucci, whose 2005 album Hikmet featured American tenor saxophonist Mark Turner as a guest.

Lussu's own catalog as a leader began comparatively late. His first co-led date was Black Machine, Live At St. Gregory's Jazz Club Rome (2005), a bop-styled live quartet recording with bassist Giorgio Rosciglione, drummer Gege Munari and multi-instrumentalist Massimo D'Avola. He followed with No Hay Banda (2008), co-billed with saxophonist Daniele Tittarelli, and Bye Bye Lazybird (2010), a quartet album led by bassist Gerardo Bartoccini featuring tenor saxophonist Max Ionata. His solo-billed debut, Northern Lights (2011, Albore Jazz), is a piano trio recording with bassist Vincenzo Florio and drummer Marco Valeri, recorded in May 2009. A second quartet co-lead, Yellow (2015, with saxophonist Gianluca Figliola), followed. In 2019 he formed a duo with vocalist Alice Ricciardi, his wife and musical partner, releasing Catch a Falling Star on their own imprint, Gibigiana Records.

Lussu has taught jazz piano in Rome since the 2010s; a faculty page for him is indexed at the Saint Louis School of Music, and a separate booking biography names the Accademia Romana di Musica as a teaching post (see notes.md for the sourcing detail on this discrepancy). He has performed at festivals and clubs including Umbria Jazz, the Rome Auditorium, Jazz a Liegi, the Getxo and Ciney jazz festivals, and the Montreux Jazz Festival, and biographical sources additionally credit stage collaborations with Pietro Tonolo, Roberto Gatto, Gabriele Mirabassi, Matthew Garrison, Stefano Di Battista, Tom Kirkpatrick, Cameron Brown and Joe Lovano; these could not be matched to a specific Discogs release and are stated here as press/bio-sourced rather than discography-verified (see notes.md).

Lussu's playing sits across two distinct lanes of Italian jazz that rarely overlap as completely as they do in his own catalog. As a leader and as Rosario Giuliani's pianist, his idiom is straight-ahead post-bop, rooted in the American bebop tradition his training under Mike Melillo, Franco D'Andrea and Enrico Rava pointed toward, and made explicit on Tribute to Bird (2021), a direct engagement with Charlie Parker's book. As a member of Nicola Conte's Schema-label circle from 2000 onward, the same piano sits inside acid-jazz and nu-jazz production, playing alongside DJs, vocalists and a club-oriented rhythm section rather than a straight-ahead rhythm section. Lussu has moved between the two contexts for over two decades without either one displacing the other, and his most recent duo project, Catch a Falling Star (2019) with vocalist Alice Ricciardi, sits closer to a standards-and-original-song format than either lane.