LILIO GREGORIO (1479-1552), a celebrated classical scholar of Italy, was born at Ferrara. The early part of Giraldi's career is a bright example of severe study successfully carried on amid hardships and privations of every kind. The fall of Constantinople had spread the learning of Greece throughout Europe, and Giraldi applied himself to master that branch of knowledge, then new and strange in the West, under the care of Chalcondylas at Milan. The fruits of his extensive erudition was a vast number of treatises on the literature and antiquities of the ancient world. Through one of these Giraldi's name is still remembered—his Historia de Diis Gentium. To him belongs the merit of having first examined the mythology of the ancients, and applied to its elucidation an amount of learning and judgment till that time unknown.

Another distinguished member of this family was Giovanni Battiste Giraldi Cintio, who wrote a large number of novelli and miscellaneous pieces, of which the most remarkable was his Gli Hecatomiti, or Hundred Tales.