100 Piazze

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100 Piazze for Driade | 2007 

Italy’s most renowned squares and their surrounding monuments are vividly brought to life in the centerpieces designed by Fabio Novembre. These pieces capture the essence of iconic locations from Turin to Lucca and Florence to Rome, among others.

“I was born in Lecce, a small city halfway between Milan and Africa. I lived there until I was 18 years old, and my shoes still bear some of the grit from the squares where I played soccer with friends or made out with the girls. A piazza was a place where anything could happen, a meeting place for civilization before the era of mobile phones. Today I am 40, and an architect. Age and profession form a filter through which I have an ideal image of those places. Rediscovering them with Google Earth and resizing them with a uniform criterion, they have become witnesses to more intimate encounters, fulcrums of more private gestures. The relationships of scale have changed, and maybe the reflecting surfaces of these piazza/trays can be of use as an amarcord to ‘reflect’ about our times.” -Fabio Novembre