Born in 1907 in Belluno, he belonged to old patrician family, though his father Michelangelo Minio was a science teacher and later a curator at the Natural History Museum of Venice.
During this time, he also became involved in Aristoteles Latinus, a project to describe medieval Latin translations of the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle's works.
In 1938, he married Magda Ungar, but she being foreign and Jewish, their marriage was not recognised by the state, so in 1939 they immigrated to England, after Sir David Ross invited him to Oxford.
[4] As The Times noted, Minio-Paluello was "one of the foremost scholars to leave Italy in the 1940s [sic] in disgust at the Fascist régime".
[5] Minio-Paluello's work on editing the second volume of the Aristoteles Latinus series was his most important contribution to scholarship and, two years after its publication, he was elected a fellow of the British Academy (in 1957).