Born in Rome, before World War II Lizzani worked as a scenarist on such films as Roberto Rossellini's Germany Year Zero, Alberto Lattuada's The Mill on the Po (both 1948), and Giuseppe De Santis' Bitter Rice (1949), for which he received an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Story.

His film L'oro di Roma (1961) examined events around the final deportation of the Jews of Rome and the Roman roundup, grande razzia, of October 1943.

[3] Lizzani worked frequently for Italian television in the 1980s and supervised the Venice International Film Festival for four editions, from 1979 to 1982.

[5] For his 1996 film Celluloide, which deals with the making of Rome, Open City, he received another David di Donatello award for his screenplay.

[3] While preparing for the film L'orecchio del potere ("The Ear of Power", a project he cultivated since the late nineties with the title Operazione Appia Antica), Lizzani committed suicide in Rome at the age of 91, when he jumped from the balcony of his apartment in Via dei Gracchi on 5 October 2013.