Gino Nibbi (1896–1969) was an Italian-born naturalised Australian author, art critic, gallerist, intellectual, and bookseller in Australia and Italy, who helped educate and connect Melbourne modernist artists and their public.

Post-war he kept accounts for an agricultural cooperative in Fermo then for a pasta factory Società Molini e Pastifici, in Porto San Giorgio, where on 3 April 1922 he married schoolteacher Elvira Petrelli whose father was a painter, a copyist of old masters.

Mussolini's accession to power was a factor in prompting the move, since Nibbi had been a fervent supporter of the Italian Republican Party, with its strong liberal tradition of anti-clericalism, anti-monarchism and anti-fascism.

[13][14] Il Giornale Italiano of Sydney quoted the reception of his book by Quadrivio, the literary weekly of Rome of 8 July 1934; 'his observations do not stop at the surface, and also because the journey is very rich in details.

You’ll find at the Leonardo Art Shop, as well as the more important English  and American publications, books and periodicals in almost every European tongue French, German, Russian, Spanish, Italian, Polish, Yiddish—Adequate reproductions of the New Masters—Cezanne, Van Gogh, Renoir, Manet—Art-albums for architects and interior decorators—and modern music, too.

[18]Rees declares that 'the Leonardo Art Shop...inspired a generation of young artists to create a homegrown avant-garde...' in the inter-war decades which 'were the heyday of the White Australia policy...with little diversity and few outside influences, Melbourne was a staid and conservative city, suspicious of new ideas that might challenge the status quo.

Picasso, Matisse, Cezanne, Gauguin – artists we now revere as visionaries – were dismissed by Australian critics as degenerates whose abstracted and expressionist forms threatened the principles of academic painting.

[20] He imported and sold postcards; magazines including in 1931 the radical magazine Stream,[21] the publishing address of which was his shop, and for which he wrote on modern art;[22] plays and poetry by Melbourne authors; and books in various languages, on European modernism;[23] as well as the quality poster prints of Post-Impressionist works published by Piper in Munich; all being superior to the reproductions previously seen by his customers who included Clarice Beckett, Len Crawford, Russell Drysdale, Albert Tucker, Arthur Boyd, John Perceval, Ian Fairweather, Eric Thake, and Donald Friend.

Fairweather had left Bali for Melbourne early in 1934 and was quickly oriented to the Antipodean scene when Nibbi, who recognised his unique talent, introduced him to George Bell, 'Jock' Frater,[25] Arnold Shore and others.

[29]Nibbi would invite O’Connor to his home, a modest weatherboard terrace-house at 4 Kooyong-Koot Road, Hawthorn where he had original artworks; ‘a nice Chirico [his late Horses on the Beach, a gift of the artist][1] some paintings by Gino Severini, the Italian cubist, a Carlo Carrà, and he had a Kisling, Moïse Kisling…’[29] De Chirico's intrigue with distant, melancholic Melbourne, mentioned early in his 1929 Hebdomeros, was piqued when his friend Nibbi sent him a postcard of the city's Italianate Treasury Building.

[33] The couple traveled to Italy on the SS Pierre Loti for the launch of Nibbi's short stories Il Volto degli Emigranti (Florence, 1937), thirteen accounts by Italian migrants gathered in Melbourne and further afield amongst cane cutters in Queensland.

[38] The couple toured Madeira, on which Nibbi wrote a travelogue for the Melbourne Herald,[39] and visited Berlin, then Paris, where he interviewed De Chirico, Brancusi, Zadkine and Kisling for his biography of Modigliani which he announced on his return would be his next book.

[2] In October that year he loaned to the New South Wales National Gallery for an exhibition of contemporary European art[41] his Kisling, which Basil Burdett singled out as 'the most representative modern work in the show.

Nibbi took issue, in a December 1939 letter to the editor of the Herald, with the selection of modernist works by National Gallery trustees in which 'distortions of the truth' about their private lives was raised as disqualifying them from the collection.

Protesting the incontestable authority of conventional realism most strongly, Moore wrote, was A.M.E. Bale, whom Cézanne could teach 'nothing about the reality of representation', while Jo Sweatman, regarding modernism was a fad of the times, called for its suppression as an evil.

He details how sculptor Clive Stephen 'excavates' material to 'free it from some secret'; discovers a 'controlled sobriety' and balance in David Strachan's 'debut' in cubist still life; admires Erik Dorn's arabesque line and Louise Thomas's 'unusual virility'; praises Purvis Smith as 'one of the most qualified at present to give some allegorical interpretations of the virgin appearances of the Australian land'; expresses disappointment that George Bell, a 'modern experimenter' and main founder of the group was not well-represented in the exhibition; encourages Sali Herman's nascent inventive ventures; and puzzles over Joan Yonge's success in 'producing portraits with such thick and vibrating impastos, and of an inspiration so warm'; remarks that Marjorie North is 'seduced by the cubistic technique'; and admired Edith Hughston's 'head of a girl, whose accent, expressively barbaric, was most effective.

[67] For Max Harris's Angry Penguins 4th 1940 issue Nibbi's poetic essay on 'Rousseau Le Doouanier' was translated from the Italian,[68] and in the following issue he wrote about Arthur Rimbaud, and in 1941 for Cecily Crozier's A Comment he wrote on El Greco, rhapsodising over his: ...harmony of the vertical line in the gothic cut of characters stretched skywards, as ushered by the ether which blurs their features; organization of acute angles allowing more stressed violation of space; prettiness of tapering fingers to the extent of resembling petals of strange lilies; phosphorescences wriggling along edges of contours, as if burning by contagion.

[69] In Ern Malley's Journal, also edited by Max Harris and John Reed, with Barrie Reid, in 1955 he writes in Italian, translating into English himself, about the 'anti-romantic' qualities of Arthur Boyd's then current production of terracotta sculpture.

Operating that outlet for ten years Nibbi maintained his Australian connection, writing for example on an instigator of the Eureka Stockade, Raffaello Carboni,[71] and mounting an exhibition there of Sidney Nolan's and Albert Tucker's work, before commuting restlessly between his native and adopted countries over 1954-1963, finding himself, as Luzi notes, 'intolerant of Europe, but equally dissatisfied with Australia.

He advocates for a massive influx of international populations to stimulate "biological renewal" and cultural development, diversity being the key to the nation's maturation, a panacea to the psychological effects of geographical isolation and detachment from global intellectual movements.

[2] While writing reviews, on Jacques Chardonne[75] and Barbara Hepworth[76] among others, for the weekly cultural supplement of the Italian IDEA in 1953, Nibbi published in Florence his philosophical Oracoli sommessi: pagine di breviario ('Whispered Oracles: Breviary pages')[77] a series of short meditations, in the form of breviaries, on diverse subjects; concepts, things, morals, sentiments, like glory, or treachery, places, artists and writers, food, animals and plants.

Enjoying the last six years of his life back in his native country, and visits to the Marche provinces, Nibbi's love of language that he shared with his wife inspired his compiling a dictionary of endangered Italian dialects spoken in Macerata and Ascoli Piceno.