Piazza de Fabris

Every town square makes an argument about what matters. Nove's makes one about clay: Piazza de Fabris fronts the Civic Ceramics Museum, flanks the town hall and carries the name of the Nove-born sculptor whose 1875 bequest founded the school that grew into the museum facing this square.

Why it matters

Piazza de Fabris is a central square in front of the Museo Civico della Ceramica and beside the Municipio. That arrangement is the point. In most Veneto towns the main piazza belongs to the church and the counts; in Nove it belongs to ceramics and civic administration, with the museum's entrance — officially numbered Piazza Giuseppe De Fabris — occupying the leading position and the town hall at the flank. The square's arrangement reflects the town's civic and artistic history.

The name is a monument in itself. Giuseppe De Fabris was born in Nove in 1790, the son of a Bassano-born father who directed production at the Antonibon ceramics manufactory in the years when it employed some two hundred workers across terraglia, maiolica and porcelain; the boy learned modelling around the workshops before rising to become one of the nineteenth century's leading neoclassical sculptors, his statue of Saint Peter set before Saint Peter's Basilica in Rome and his funeral monument to Canova placed in the Frari in Venice. The official museum history records that the town's Scuola di Disegno e Plastica applicata alla Ceramica was founded in 1875 by his testamentary will, becoming the Regia Scuola d'Arte in 1890.

What to notice

The museum and town hall frame the square. The museum building, once the seat of the ceramics school, sets a learned, nineteenth-century tone; the town hall answers it from the side, its facade carrying municipal notices and the everyday business of a small Comune. The square brings together municipal administration and the town's ceramics collection, with the BiblioMuseo and parish church nearby.

The museum's entrance opens directly onto the square. In a town compressed between the Brenta and the hills, the piazza acts as the town's shared open space, where the ceramics community still crosses paths.

Context and history

The square carries the memory of the bequest that industrialized Nove's artistic training. De Fabris's 1875 legacy brought a drawing and modelling school into being, its graduates staffing the town's manufactories; today the Civic Ceramics Museum, inaugurated in 1995, occupies the old Regia Scuola d'Arte premises, and its door opens onto this piazza. The town hall's own address on the same piazza underlines how completely the square operates as Nove's civic centre. The full arc is unusually compact: a sculptor's fortune, a school, a museum, and the administrative heart of the comune arranged around a single paved space on the edge of the Brenta plain.

The square's name also commemorates the sculptor whose bequest founded the ceramics school.