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.
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.
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.
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.
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.