Renato Sellani was born January 8, 1926, in Senigallia, on the Marche region's Adriatic coast, and died October 31, 2014, in Milan at age 88. He came to jazz unusually late and by an unusual route for an Italian musician of his generation: his mother had been an opera soprano, but Sellani himself had never played an instrument until he moved to Rome to study political science after the Second World War and became a regular at the city's nightclubs. He taught himself piano at a friend's house, was self-taught throughout his life, and never learned to read music. He was good enough within a few years to be playing those same Rome clubs himself.

Sellani's professional career opened in 1954, when he joined the Basso-Valdambrini Quintet, the Milan-based group led by tenor saxophonist Gianni Basso and trumpeter Oscar Valdambrini. In 1958 he left the Marche for Milan for good, joining Franco Cerri's circle and drummer Gil Cuppini's quintet and opening a working relationship with Cerri that ran for decades. That year also brought the connection that introduced him to an international audience: he became Chet Baker's first regular pianist in Italy, a partnership documented across numerous Baker sessions and reissues recorded in Milan between 1959 and Baker's later Italian dates. Sellani also spent time in the RAI National Symphony Orchestra under conductor Gorni Kramer, and composed incidental music for the theater, including scores for Milan's Piccolo Teatro and a long collaboration with the stage company of actor Tino Buazzelli.

Through the 1959-1968 Basso-Valdambrini years, Sellani is Discogs-credited alongside Basso and Valdambrini on the quintet's core RCA and Jolly recordings, including Walking in the Night (1960) and the expanded octet date New Sound from Italy (1959), and on Chet Baker's Sextet & Quartet (1959) alongside Basso, Glauco Masetti and Cerri. He also recorded in this period with visiting Americans Buddy Collette and Herb Geller, both documented on Discogs as direct studio credits from their Milan sessions.

Sellani recorded prolifically as a leader from the 1990s onward, mostly for producer Paolo Piangiarelli's Philology label, in solo, duo and trio settings; Discogs documents 69 releases under his own name, the great majority on Philology between 1994 and 2014. Most of that run features his long-standing working trio with bassist Massimo Moriconi and drummer Massimo Manzi, a partnership that Moriconi's own biography describes as opening with the 1988 duo album Doppio Passo (Carosello) and running for more than two decades through dozens of Philology releases. Alongside the trio dates, Sellani built an extensive catalog of duo albums with fellow Italian musicians: a long-running two-tenor and piano partnership with Gianni Basso spanning the À La France series, Two for the Cities (2003) and Body and Soul (2009); a piano-and-accordion partnership with Gianni Coscia, including Galleria del Corso (2004) and, joined by singer Anna Maria Castelli, the trio album Something to Remember - Prima che il tempo cambi (2004, reissued 2011, Fonè); and a two-piano duo album with Danilo Rea, Amapola, issued in Japan by Venus Records in 2008 and pressed to vinyl in 2009. His trio also backed visiting saxophonist Lee Konitz on Pugni Chiusi (2001) and hosted trumpeter Fabrizio Bosso on Ciao Kramer (2003), and, on the all-Gershwin tribute Gershwin! (2007), added trumpeter Enrico Rava and vocalist Tiziana Ghiglioni. He also appears, on piano, on the various-artists compilation Milestones - Un Incontro in Jazz, alongside Gino Paoli, Rava, Danilo Rea, Flavio Boltro, Rosario Bonaccorso and Roberto Gatto. Among earlier engagements, Sellani, Basso, Cerri, Tony Scott and singer Lilian Terry are all Discogs-credited together on the live document Col d'Orcia Jazz: Concert for Brunello (1977).

He worked as a duo and trio accompanist to numerous singers, including American vocalist Shirley Bunnie Foy, and, per his own Discogs biography, Sarah Vaughan; Wikipedia and other biographical sources also describe collaborations with Billie Holiday, Dizzy Gillespie, Gerry Mulligan and Tony Scott, though none of these appears as a shared Discogs release credit under his own artist entry and they are noted here as biography-sourced rather than session-verified. Sellani's admirers nicknamed him "the Hank Jones of Italy" for his elegant, unhurried touch on standards, and critics have also compared his unerring taste as an accompanist for singers to Tommy Flanagan's; both are journalistic comparisons to other pianists rather than documented collaborations. He received the Honorary Award at the 2008 Italian Jazz Awards and the Gorni Kramer Prize in July 2014, shortly before his death that October.

Sellani built his reputation as one of Italian jazz's most romantic and harmonically sophisticated interpreters of the Great American Songbook and Italian popular song, working comfortably as a soloist, in duos and trios, and as an accompanist to singers and horn players alike. His mainstream, standards-centered repertoire and long, close association with Chet Baker's cool, lyrical style place him squarely inside cool jazz and mainstream postwar jazz piano, with bebop-literate harmony underneath the ballad-heavy surface. He never read music and worked entirely by ear, a method that reviewers consistently link to the unforced, singing quality of his phrasing. Late in his career he extended that same interpretive sensibility to classical material on Chopin - Piano Solo (2010, Philology), and to Thelonious Monk's songbook on Plays Monk (2005), without abandoning the songbook-and-standards core of his catalog.