Lamberto Pignotti was born to a painter father in 1926 in Florence. Here he graduated and lived until 1968, when he moved to Rome. In 1944, having assimilated the lesson of the avant-garde, he began experimenting with verbo-visual art. In the mid-1950s, he began his non-fiction activity, deliberately focusing on militant criticism and cultural current affairs. In these areas he regularly contributed articles and essays to newspapers and periodicals of national interest, various Italian and foreign magazines, such as Paese sera, La Nazione, L'Unità, Rinascita, and RAI programmes.

In the early 1960s he conceived and theorised the first forms of technological poetry and Visual Poetry, of which he edited the first anthology in 1965. In 1963, he set up Gruppo 70 with other artists and critics and a few months later took part in the formation of Gruppo 63. His artistic work proceeds by relating signs and codes of different origins: linguistic, visual, hearing, taste, smell, touch, behaviour, performance: From such multimedia and synaesthetic activity arise, between happenings and performances, the Poems and no-poems, the Cine-poems, the logo-musical cassettes, the plastic object books, the poems to touch, to drink, to eat, the Chewing poems and, of course, the Visual Poems in the form of collages or interventions on news, fashion and advertising photographs, etc.

Since 1954, he has published various books (poetry, narrative, non-fiction, anthologies, visual poetry) with Mondadori, Lerici, Einaudi, Marsilio, Guaraldi, Sampietro, Vallecchi, Carucci. He promotes, curates or organises, alone or with others, visual poetry exhibitions, intermediary art reviews, debates, festivals and conferences on current culture. He has participated intensively in conferences, debates, lectures, performances and festivals in Italy and abroad.