Raffaele Arena, known as Lello is an Italian cabaret performer, actor and voice actor, an exponent of the new Neapolitan comedy (brought to prominence by the theater group La Smorfia in the second half of the 1970s), along with Massimo Troisi and Enzo Decaro.

He met Massimo Troisi when he was thirteen years old, during a play in the parish theater of St. Anne’s Church. Arena devotes his heart and soul to the theater, driven above all by his friend Troisi. Together with the latter and other friends (including Enzo Decaro) he forms the group Rh-Negativo, inaugurating a new kind of theater that draws on Neapolitan farce and cabaret.

In 1977 the group (renamed I saraceni and later La Smorfia) thinned and only Troisi and Decaro remained besides Arena. In 1981 Massimo Troisi called him to play the character of Lello, the pushy friend of the main character Gaetano in Ricomincio da tre.

In 1982 he was the absolute star of Lodovico Gasparini’s film No thanks, coffee makes me nervous. In the same year he participated as an extra in the medium-length film Morto Troisi, viva Troisi! In 1983 he plays an important role in Troisi’s second film, Scusate il ritardo, where he personifies the foibles and neuroses of someone who has been left by his girlfriend. For this role he is awarded the David di Donatello as best supporting actor. After other films with great protagonists of Italian cinema, he tried his hand at directing and screenwriting with Chiari di luna (1988).

Since the early 1990s he has devoted himself to theater as well as film and television. In 2018, 30 years after his first film, he directs Arteteca in the film Finally Married.