Born in
Rome on 24 December 1920 to Emma Marzi and Venanzio Lucentini, a miller from the village of
Visso, in the
Marche region, and later the owner of a bakery in Rome. While studying
Philosophy at the University of Rome, Lucentini was one of the organizers of a practical joke against the fascist regime: on 5 May 1941, he and a friend distributed among other students paper streamers. When unrolled during a public meeting, they revealed writings such as "Down with the war!", "Down with
Hitler!" and "Long live freedom!". Lucentini was arrested and spent two months in prison. Lucentini graduated in February 1943. Drafted into military service later that year, he was refused admission to officer candidate school on account of his anti-fascist activities. After the
Armistice, the Allied armed forces put his writing skills to use, hiring him as a junior editor for the "United Nations News" press agency in
Naples. After the war, Lucentini worked in Rome for ANSA news agency; later, while associated with ONA news agency, he spent time in
Prague and
Vienna. The atmosphere of postwar Vienna provided the inspiration for his novella
I compagni sconosciuti. After a brief time again in Rome, in 1949 he left for Paris where he was employed in several jobs (deliveryman, teacher, masseur). While in
Paris, he first met the two most important people in his life: Simone Benne Darses, 12 years older than he was, who would become his lifetime partner and, in 1952,
Carlo Fruttero, with whom a lifelong literary collaboration began in 1957, when Lucentini moved to
Turin, where both of them worked for the Einaudi publishing house. Lucentini frequently travelled to Paris on scouting assignments for Einaudi looking for new authors and titles to bring to Italy. He introduced Italian readers to the works of
Jorge Luis Borges, whose works he also translated from Spanish into Italian. Lucentini also translated several foreign books for Einaudi from many different languages including Chinese and Japanese. As a highly successful and appreciated literary team,
Fruttero & Lucentini wrote books and worked in publishing, directing book series and magazines (
Il Mago,
Urania), and editing fiction anthologies, for the Einaudi publishing house and, from 1961, for Mondadori. In 1972 Lucentini and Fruttero began writing for the Turin-based daily
La Stampa (then directed by
Alberto Ronchey), writing the column "L'Agenda di F. & L.", commenting with humour and irony on current facts; they also wrote for ''
L'Espresso and Epoca''. The duo's first book was the
poetry collection ''L'idraulico non verrà
, in 1971. But their breakthrough work was the critically acclaimed crime novel La donna della domenica
(1972), set in Turin. The novel was eventually made into a film of the same title, starring Marcello Mastroianni, Jacqueline Bisset and Jean-Louis Trintignant and directed by Luigi Comencini. Their next novel, A che punto è la notte'' (1979), shared the same
protagonist, the Commissioner Santamaria. In the following decades, Lucentini and Fruttero co-authored several more novels and non-fiction books, and "F&L" became a known and appreciated quasi-trademark. In 2000 Lucentini was awarded a special
Campiello award for his life's work. Afflicted by a
lung cancer, Lucentini committed suicide on 5 August 2002, throwing himself down the stairs of his flat's building in piazza Vittorio Veneto, 1, in Turin.{{cite news |last=Giovanna |first=Favro |date=2002-08-06 |title=Il suicidio di Franco Lucentini La morte per vincere il male |url=https://archive.org/details/lastampa_2002-08-06/page/n1/ |trans-title=The suicide of Franco Lucentini: death to conquer illness |work=La Stampa |language=it ==Pseudonyms==