He was born in Sassuolo, in the province of Modena, to Agostino Medici and Ersilia Messori, the second of four children. In 1926, after graduating as a surveyor at the Guarini Institute in Modena, he enrolled at the "Istituto Superiore Agrario di Milano" where he graduated in Agricultural Sciences in 1929, with a thesis on the economy of irrigation in the Lombard plain. Once military obligations were fulfilled, he briefly taught at the Technical Institute for Surveyors of Piacenza. In 1930 he published numerous publications and in 1931 he became the assistant of Giuseppe Tassinari; the following year he was a lecturer in agricultural economics and politics at the University of Bologna. In 1933 he won the competition for the chair at the University of Perugia and was then called to teach at the University of Turin.
