Romano Bruno Mussolini was born in Forlì on 26 September 1927, the third and youngest son of Benito Mussolini, then the head of Italy's Fascist government, and Rachele Mussolini. He never went into politics himself. His working life ran through a piano bench instead: largely self-taught, he picked out classical pieces by ear as a boy and, in his teens, accompanied his father, an amateur violinist, at home.

He came to jazz in the years after the Second World War, and for a while he played it under a name that wasn't his own. Billed as Romano Full, he worked Rome's clubs and radio studios without trading on a surname that, in postwar Italy, opened no doors he wanted opened. The disguise lasted only a few years. He made his acknowledged debut under his own name in Nunzio Rotondo's quintet at the 1956 Sanremo Festival, and by 1957 he was in the RCA Italiana studios in Rome, recording sides released as Romano Mussolini Trio. A second RCA album followed in 1958, billed to Mussolini, Rotondo and singer Lilian Terry.

In 1959 he helped organize a jazz season at La Bussola in Focette, on the Tuscan coast, and played there himself alongside Chet Baker and the Swedish baritone saxophonist Lars Gullin. That year he also appeared on RAI radio with Dizzy Gillespie. Both engagements point to the role he settled into for the next decade: an Italian bandleader trusted to share a stage, and a rhythm section, with visiting American stars.

The high point of the RCA years came on 21 and 24 April 1962, when Mussolini recorded Jazz Allo Studio 7 at Studio 7 in Milan with trumpeter Cicci Santucci, tenor saxophonist Enzo Scoppa, trombonist Dino Piana, clarinetist Gianni Sanjust, bassist Carlo Loffredo and drummer Franco Tonani, released under the name Romano Mussolini All-Stars. It won Italy's jazz critics' prize for 1963 and remains the record most frequently singled out in his catalogue. He returned to some of the same players, Loffredo, Tonani and Piana, on At the Santa Tecla, named for the Milan club.

Among the American musicians who settled in Rome was clarinetist Tony Scott, and in 1973 the two of them made a duo album together, self-produced, with a plain gatefold sleeve that copies in circulation are often found signed by both musicians. By the mid-1970s Mussolini had moved from acoustic piano to Fender Rhodes and toward a heavier, funk-inflected sound: Mirage (1974), with altoist Glauco Masetti, trumpeter Emilio Soana and percussionist Tullio De Piscopo, and Soft & Swing (1979), with Cicci Santucci again on flugelhorn, both sit closer to soul-jazz and jazz-funk than to the RCA quintet dates. In the same period he and composer Roberto Pregadio scored several Italian genre films, Mussolini crediting himself as "Raymond Full" or "Manuel Parada" on titles including Kriminal (1966) and Satanik (1968); both scores were reissued on CD by Beat Records in 2006 with his own name restored to the credits.

He kept working with younger musicians through the 1980s, among them bassist Massimo Moriconi and guitarist Eddy Palermo; a 1982 trio date billed as "Trio Romano Mussolini, Massimo Moriconi, Pici Mazzei Plus Eddy Palermo, Wilfred Copello" was pressed as a promotional-only disc and is the clearest record of that circle. In 1985 he took part in an NBC television special filmed in Rome and New York, appearing alongside drummer Pat LaBarbera, trumpeter Valery Ponomarev and guitarist George Benson; that year he also toured Canada and played dates in Spain.

Mussolini went on recording into the 2000s, mostly for small Italian labels, and performed until close to the end of his life. He died in Rome on 3 February 2006, at 78. He is buried in the family crypt at the San Cassiano cemetery in Predappio. His daughter from his first marriage, to Maria Scicolone (a sister of the actress Sophia Loren), is Alessandra Mussolini, later an actress, singer and member of the Italian and European parliaments.

Mussolini's playing belongs to the mainstream, swing-descended wing of postwar European jazz rather than to any of the harder-edged movements that developed alongside it. His RCA-era records, built around working trios and quintets with a horn or two added, sit comfortably next to the touring American rhythm-section work he was hired for throughout the late 1950s and 1960s: clean time, a light touch, and arrangements built to frame a guest soloist rather than to challenge one.

The 1970s records complicate that picture. On Mirage and Soft & Swing he set the acoustic piano aside for Fender Rhodes and moved toward the soul-jazz and jazz-funk vocabulary that much of Italian light and library music absorbed in the same decade, a shift shared by contemporaries working the same Rome and Milan studio circuit. His parallel career scoring genre films under pseudonyms belongs to that same world of Italian studio professionalism, closer to commercial orchestration than to the jazz-club dates that made his name.

Across both phases, the constant is a career built on accompaniment: a bandleader whose own catalogue is inseparable from the list of better-known musicians, Italian and American, that he shared a stand with.