Italo Valenti began to paint in 1927 and attended drawing courses, but only from 1931 he devoted himself systematically to his artistic education. He first studied at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Venice, then at the Accademia di Brera in Milan. A trip to Paris and Brussels familiarized him with the currents of the European avant-garde. In 1937/38 he joined the group "Corrente" in Milan, an internationally oriented circle of artists and writers.


For his livelihood, Valenti did teaching at the Academy. After the Second World War, he resigned from the group "Corrente," whose political-ideological orientation he did not like to follow. In 1952 he left Milan and moved to Locarno.


Meanwhile, he had become internationally known by participating in the Venice Biennale in 1948 and 1950, as well as by numerous other exhibitions. Traveling within and outside of Europe offered him the opportunity in the following years to deal with new trends in art, to gain inspiration by visiting museums and to make contacts.


In 1981 Valenti obtained Swiss citizenship.Valenti's art of the post-war period is marked by the liberation from figurative painting and the turn to the European flow of Informel. The collage technique was at the center of his artistic interest. Valenti used boxes of different colors and thicknesses. He cut or tore these into individual pictorial elements whose shapes should be abstract, ie without reminiscences of objects.