Italian pianist, composer, conductor, and author Francesco Libetta was born in Salento – the "heel" of Italy's "boot" – in 1968. His name began circulating among piano cognoscenti after his remarkable traversal of Leopold Godowsky's 53 Studies on Chopin's Études, in Milan in 1994. Libetta was the very first pianist to play the entire cycle in concert, from memory, and he has repeated the feat in Florence, Naples, Tokyo, Brasilia, and Miami. Libetta's repertory encompasses a wide span, from some of the earliest music written for keyboard instruments prior to the piano as well as Bach and Handel; Classical and Romantic composers from Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert to Mendelssohn, Chopin, Schumann, Liszt and Brahms; transcriptions (by Liszt and himself) from 19th-century opera and of the work of Italian singer-songwriter Franco Battiato; and the music of the 20th-century from Debussy, Rachmaninoff, and Ravel to Olivier Messiaen and György Ligeti (with whom he prepared the Hungarian composer's Études, giving the first public performance of N. 13 "The Devil's Staircase."

Recent recordings include two sets of the complete Beethoven Sonatas (played on both historic and modern instruments, C&Co), Liszt Années de Pèlerinage (C&Co), and Chopin selon Chopin (Sony International).The film of Libettta's recital at the Festival de La Roque d'Anthéron (France) in 2002 by acclaimed documentary filmmaker Bruno Monsaingeon was awarded the 'Diapason d'Or' and the 'CHOC de Le Monde de la Musique' prizes in the following year.

Critics have consistently given Libetta the highest accolades. Matthew Gurewitsch described him in The New York Times as a "poet-aristocrat of the keyboard, with the profile and bearing of a Renaissance prince." In Le Monde de la Musique, Olivier  Bellamy singled him out as "the heir of Moritz Rosenthal, Ferruccio Busoni, and Leopold Godowsky." The conductor Francesco Maria Colombo has noted "the noble filigree of Libetta's pianistic timbre … a quality thought lost in the dusty archives of pianistic interpretation." The late great Neapolitan pianist Aldo Ciccolini considered Libetta "the most gifted instrumentalist of his generation." And Paolo Isotta defined him in Milan's Corriere della Sera, as "a profound musician, a pianist of deep culture" who possesses "an incomparable freedom and authority."