Gianfranco Frattini was born in 1926 in Padua to a Milanese lawyer and the child of a prominent Bergamo family. While he was young, they moved back to Milan, a city with which Frattini would be intimately associated for the rest of his life. He was awarded an architecture degree from the Politecnico di Milano in 1953, entering the cohort of polymath Milanese architects and designers who would drive the post-war renaissance of Italian design.