He focused his translation efforts on Russian and German authors such as Fyodor Dostoevsky, Aleksandr Pushkin, Nikolai Gogol and Hugo von Hofmannsthal.

He spent much of his life in Rome and at the family home at Pico, as well as the gaming houses of Sanremo and Venice, where he was an avid gambler.

[3] His originality lies principally in his ability to incorporate his wide knowledge of European literature into his Italian inheritance, with a poet's (and translator's) close concern with language.

[5] Landolfi constantly strives to enrich his own style, drawing on obscure or even archaic formulations and at times creating his own languages.

La pietra lunare (1939), his first novel, opens on a grotesque and almost hallucinatory scene of 'provincial life' from which the main character, Giovancarlo, is possessed by Gurù, the goat-girl, who allures him through a realm of phantasmagorical horror into the bowels of the earth and an erotic initiation.

Cancroregina (1950) is a strange science-fiction story, in the form of a diary written by a man who is stuck in orbit in outer space and cannot return to Earth.