He was a famous Italian writer and literary critic. He wrote critical biographies of Goethe, Alexander the Great, Kafka and Marcel Proust as well as a short but unforgettable memoir on his thirty-year friendship with Italo Calvino. In Kafka, Pietro Citati has the great writer declare: "'I am like you, I am a man like you, I suffer and rejoice as you do, like a meticulous and buoyant angel, a being who lives far away in a world that did not belong even to him." From 1973 to 1988, he contributed to the cultural section of Corriere della Sera and had been the literary critic for la Repubblica since 1988.