Born in Pula-Croatia to Piedmontese parents, Arpino moved to Bra in the Province of Cuneo. Here he married Caterina Brero before moving to Turin, where he would remain for the rest of his life. He graduated in 1951 with a thesis on the Russian poetSergei Yesenin and the following year made his literary debut with the novelSei stato felice, Giovanni, published by Einaudi. He took up sports journalism, writing for the daily papersLa Stampa and Il Giornale; together with Gianni Brera at the La Gazzetta dello Sport he brought a new literary quality to Italian writing on sport. His most important work in this line was the 1977 football novel Azzurro tenebra. In Italy he got to know the Argentinian writer and fellow sports enthusiast Osvaldo Soriano. Arpino also wrote plays, short stories, epigrams and stories for children. He won the Strega Prize in 1964 with L'ombra delle colline, the Premio Campiello of 1972 with Randagio è l'eroe and the 1980 SuperCampiello with Il fratello italiano. His novels are characterised by a dry and ironic style. His novel Un delitto d'onore became Pietro Germi’s highly regarded 1962 comedy Divorce, Italian Style, with Marcello Mastroianni. His story Il buio e il miele was made into two films: Dino Risi’s Profumo di donna, with Vittorio Gassman, and Martin Brest’s Scent of a woman, which earned Al Pacino an Academy Award for Best Actor. Arpino died in Turin in 1987. His links to his childhood town of Bra have been maintained by the establishment of a multifunctional cultural centre and of a prize for children's literature.
In Renzo e Luciana, an episode from Boccaccio '70 taken from Italo Calvino’s L'avventura di due sposi and directed by Mario Monicelli, Arpino worked on the screenplay alongside Calvino, Susi Cecchi D'Amico and Mario Monicelli.
His Il buio e il miele was turned into the well-known and multiple prize-winning film Profumo di donna, directed by Dino Risi with Vittorio Gassman as Captain Fausto Consolo and Agostina Belli as Sara. This film in turn was remade in 1992 as Scent of a Woman.
In 1977 Dino Risi's film Anima persa, with Vittorio Gassman as Fabio Stolz and Catherine Deneuve as Sofia Stolz, was freely adapted from Arpino's novel of the same name.
In a 1991 documentary for the French television series Un livre un jour Arpino appeared as himself.
