Nino Tirinnanzi was born to a middle-class family in Greve a Chianti, Italy in 1923. He studied art with Domenico Giuliotti. At age thirteen he enrolled at the Institute of Art in Florence, which he left in 1936 after meeting Ottone Rosai. He became an assistant to Rosai who introduced him to the artistic and cultural environment of the  the literary café Le Giubbe Rosse ("Red Jackets") on the Piazza Vittoria in Florence. Here he met and became friends with Eugenio Montale, Mario Luzi, Elio Vittorini, Vasco Pratolini, Alessandro Parronchi and Piero Bigongiari.

Conscripted in WWII, Tirinnanzi fled Rhodes after the Germans invaded, passing through Turkey, Lebanon, Palestine, and Egypt, finally returning to Florence in 1946. He resumed exhibiting the following year at Galleria Il Fiore and then in 1948 at Rome’s Galleria Chiurazzi introduced by Carlo Emilio Gadda. In 1950, the artist won the Critics Award at the Fiorino in Florence. In 1951 he was invited to the Venice Biennale and later to the Rome Quadrennial. In 1953 he was awarded the Olivetti prize in the 5th edition of the Gulf of La Spezia painting prize. In 1954 he held a personal exhibition in Milan introduced by an essay by Pier Carlo Santini.

The following decade again opened in Rome with an invitation to the Quadrennial. Other important personal exhibitions were held: in 1962 in Florence at Galleria S. Croce, with a monograph by Marco Valsecchi, and in 1965 in Milan, with a presentation by Alfonso Gatto. From 1969 on, he worked with Pananti Gallery in Florence, where the artist had shows in 1973 and in 1974, presented by Montale; in 1978, introduced by Strati; and in 1982, with a series of drawings, whose monograph was edited by Ragghianti. In 2006 there was a retrospective exhibition in the Palazzo Vecchio hall of arms in honor of his 40-year career.

Among his various commissions were the Porta a S. Giorgio panel, now at the Cassa di Risparmio di Firenze, and four panels for the RAI offices in Rome. His religious painting includes the great fresco from 1961 in the chapel of S. Anna in Greve in Chianti and, twenty years later, the altarpiece for the church of the Nome di Gesù in Florence. His pictorial style was influenced by the Rosai and is characterized by the delicate design, the tranquility of the compositions and the color flooded with poetic light. His works are exhibited in numerous public and private art collections in Italy and abroad. His work captured the light and lushness of the Tuscan landscape, the vineyards, villages and people.

Nino Tirinnanzi lived most of his life in Florence but returned often to Greve a Chianti, where he died in 2002.