Together with his PhD supervisor Evgeny Lifshitz and with Vladimir Berestetskii, he was also the co-author of a few volumes of the influential Landau–Lifschitz Course of Theoretical Physics series.
Collaborating with Vitaly Ginzburg, Pitaevskii developed a theory of superfluidity in the neighbourhood of a transition point.
Another famous paper was written in collaboration with Igor E. Dzyaloshinsky and Evgeny Lifshitz on the van der Waals forces where the theory of the thermal and quantum fluctuations of the electromagnetic field was developed in a systematic way with important implications on modern applications to solid state physics and atomic physics.
Lev Pitaevskii started collaborating with the University of Trento at the end of the 1980s through a series of long term visits.
After a few years spent at the Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa he eventually became professor of Trento University in 1998.