Palazzo Baccin – BiblioMuseo

Palazzo Baccin binds Nove's two civic vocations — books and ceramics — inside an eighteenth-century merchant's palace on the old Brenta embankment. Its glazed terraglia frieze, modelled by a ceramics dynasty, fronts a BiblioMuseo programme pairing the municipal library with displays drawn from the town's pottery heritage.

Why it matters

Nove built palaces on ceramics money, and Palazzo Baccin is the clearest case. Local heritage accounts place its construction at the end of the 1700s by Giovanni Maria Baccin, a ceramics entrepreneur who made his career inside the Antonibon manufactory before founding his own firm producing English-style terraglia, the creamware that was reshaping European tables. The palace rose on the Liston, the ancient embankment of the Brenta — the same riverbank geography that gave the town its mills, its clay trade and its kiln districts. Between the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the building even hosted Nove's first school, run privately, where a priest taught the children of ceramicists.

The BiblioMuseo name describes the municipal project's pairing of library and museum functions around this historic seat; the national ArtBonus portal records a plan to consolidate the library inside the palace, alongside the adjacent palazzo Zanolli-Sebellin, as a protected monumental complex. The palace's ceramic decoration connects its civic functions with Nove's manufacturing history.

What to notice

Beneath the central tympanum of the facade runs what the ArtBonus record calls a large and refined ceramic frieze: a 1923 allegorical composition in painted and glazed terraglia by "Doro" Sebellin, with putti playing with geese and trailing festoons of polychrome flowers and fruit. Each tile was hand-modelled, using a technique Sebellin learned while assisting professor Luigi Fabris on the Hotel Hungaria facade at the Venice Lido — a small footnote that ties this provincial facade to a famous Art Nouveau landmark.

Inside, the library holds nearly twenty thousand documents on open shelves, renewed at around two hundred items a year, with a dedicated ceramics section; plates portraying notable figures of Nove, painted by Ottorino Pigatto, hang within the reading spaces. The ArtBonus furnishing project — shelving, tables, display cases and lighting, budgeted at 177,000 euros — was designed to display ceramic pieces from the town's museum holdings that are not otherwise visible.

Context and history

After the Baccin era the property passed through heirs and was divided toward the end of the 1800s. In 1922 three Nove ceramicists — Teodoro Sebellin, Sebastiano Zanolli and Alessandro Zarpellon — began buying back portions, nearly reconstituting the original complex, and their factory era became legendary locally: over three thousand catalogue models at its peak, and the nickname fabbrica dei tosi, "the boys' factory", for the youth of its owners. The firm's designers won the Premio Palladio in 1962 and 1973, with Pompeo Pianezzola among the awarded. The municipal library operates within the Vicenza library network; the ArtBonus campaign described a plan to consolidate it in the palazzo.