As a member of AICA (International Association of Art Critics) and SGDL (Society of Men of Letters of France), he was awarded the Georges Jamati Prize for the best essay on the theatre, arts and social science published in France in 1989; both the Filmcritica Prize for the best essay on cinema and photography published in Italy and the Giubbe Rosse Prize for the best literary biography essay published in Italy in 2002; and the Venetian Academy Silver Medal in 2010for the lectio magistralis (keynote speech) delivered at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Venice.

Between 1973 and 1988, Lista translated the writings of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Luigi Russolo, Umberto Boccioni as well as the syntheses of plays, theoretical texts and manifestos of the Futurists by publishing several collections and anthologies which introduced and divulged the Italian avant-garde in France.

At the same time he developed an original approach to the work of Fernand Léger, Robert Delaunay, Marcel Duchamp, Jacques Villon, Francis Picabia, Raymond Duchamp-Villon and Jean Metzinger, dubbed "French Cubo-Futurism".

He contributed in driving the Futurist scholars' attitude towards modernity by focusing on the sense of social and psychological trauma as a result of the industrial transformation.

He also found that Marinetti and associated Futurists held a diminished regard for photography's potential to display the entirety of human life.

In 1982, and then in 1984, he published a two-volume general catalogue of the works of Giacomo Balla, a Futuristic artist of whom he later organised a major retrospective (Milan, 2008).

In 1983, in the book De Chirico and the Avant-Garde, Lista assembled unpublished epistolary documentation on the relationship between Italian and French artists.

In 1997, in the book The Modern Stage: World Encyclopaedia of the Performing Arts in the Second Half of the Twentieth Century (1945–1995), he investigates the different visual forms of scenic creation within the contemporary culture of imagery going beyond the dramatic text.

In 2001 he tackled the study of Futurist cinema and advanced its discovery by organising three major retrospectives (Rovereto, Barcelona, Paris, 2001–2009).