Giorno is the illegitimate son of , conceived with 's stolen body. He is introduced as Haruno Shiobana (汐華 初流乃), a half-Japanese teenager living in Italy. He speaks of his intention to join the powerful gang and his dream of becoming a "Gang-Star" (combining "Gangster" and "Superstar") to restore virtue to the corrupt mafia. Giorno is a natural-born User wielding the life-giving Gold Experience in battle.
Giorno is a teenage boy of average height and slim yet muscular build, far smaller in stature than previous . He has golden hair of moderate length tied back in a short, braided tail, with three distinctive oversized curls arranged in a row over his forehead. His hair was originally black and unkempt but transformed upon awakening his Stand. His eyes, especially present in earlier depictions, sharpen at the ends similar to those of his father's.
Giorno wears a two-piece suit with a checkered coat tail and several ornate features, including wing-shaped emblems on the collars and a heart-shaped opening in the chest area. The most distinctive feature on his suit are the three ladybug emblems located on either side of his chest and directly below his zipper, matching the appearance of his Stand. Later on, his shoes also have the same ladybug emblem on them. The color scheme for his suit often changes in different depictions, but the most common colors are blue outlined with gold and pink outlined with green.
Haruno Shiobana was the son of (fathered using Jonathan Joestar's body) and a Japanese woman. His first years were marked by his mother's neglect, as she left home often due to his existence threatening her party life, forcing Haruno to be left alone at night to fear the dark, too scared to even cry. When he turned four, his mother married an Italian man and they moved to Italy, resulting in Haruno changing his name to "Giorno Giovanna". His new stepfather, however, would often beat him for always trying to read others when his mother was not around, even though it was that same physical abuse that brought about Giorno's habit. That, coupled with the fact that Giorno easily became the target of bullies, gave him very low self-esteem, to the point of believing himself to be scum and setting him on the path to becoming twisted and immoral.
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However, one day as Giorno was walking home, he came upon a man covered in blood lying in a patch of tall grass. After discovering the injured man, other men approached Giorno, asking him if he knew where the man had gone. Giorno lied to the men, feeling that the injured man was the same as him, and subconsciously activated his Stand's ability to mask the man's presence by causing the grass to grow taller and bloom flora. Around two months later, the man showed himself to Giorno again and told him that he would never forget what had been done for him.
Things soon turned brighter for Giorno: his father stopped beating him and he became popular among kids his own age. It turned out that the man was a gangster who quietly watched over Giorno from the shadows. To Giorno, this was the first time someone else had treated him like a human being and showed him respect. The trust that Giorno should have learned from his father was instead taught to him by others, and ever since then something that can be described as a "cool breeze" blew inside his heart, marking his change from a cold and antisocial individual to a charming and righteous one. He subsequently forges a dream to make the corrupt Italian mafia like the man who had helped him, and strive to become a "Gang-Star".
