Nemo Gonano Award 2025
Today, Tuesday 2 December 2025, in the Aula Magna of the Scuola Mosaicisti del Friuli, the Nemo Gonano Prize was awarded to student Matilde Colli for a mosaic icon depicting the face of the Madonna.
This award is an opportunity to remember Nemo Gonano, politician, intellectual, man of institutions, who was president of the Consorzio della Scuola Mosaicisti del Friuli for a decade from 1994 and an active member of the Rotary Club Maniago-Spilimbergo. The latter association, in close agreement with the Scuola Mosaicisti del Friuli, decided to establish an award named after him in 2020/2021: a scholarship to be awarded to a student in the second year of the school who has distinguished themselves in the technical and expressive execution of their end-of-year essay.
Now in its fifth edition, this year’s award went to Matilde Colli, currently in her final year of training at the Scuola Mosaicisti del Friuli. Her work is a Byzantine-style face of the Madonna, rendered with natural materials, gold and Venetian enamels for the robe and a large gold leaf halo, all set in an antique wooden frame. The figure, as Colli herself explained in front of her work, is an interpretation of a piece by a Romanian iconographer, which Colli has made her own and imbued with sweetness by choosing the colours and carefully crafting the composition. To emphasise the maternal role, she then added, following the tradition of votive icons, some letters in Greek to signify the role of the Madonna, Mother of God.
When accepting the award, the student thanked the Rotary Club Maniago-Spilimbergo and the Scuola Mosaicisti del Friuli,
she also expressed her gratitude to the mosaic teachers who guided her in learning the Byzantine technique and in creating the work, Luca Nardini and Elena Pauletto, and to all her classmates who are sharing with her the final year of the training course to become a Master Mosaicist.
As with previous winning works, the mosaic will be displayed for a year in a public place: Spilimbergo Town Hall.
Last year, Maniago Town Hall welcomed an angelic portrait by Ukrainian student Valeriia Radchenko, and in 2023, a Byzantine Madonna by Romagna student Corinna Bizzocchi was placed in the municipality of Prato Carnico, the birthplace of Nemo Gonano. Earlier, in 2022, it was the Regional Council in Trieste that hosted the three-dimensional mosaic symbolising life and eternity by student Margherita Toffolo, and in 2021, the Town Hall of Montereale Valcellina hosted the abstract mosaic panel by student Chiara Fornasari from Mantua. This is one of the objectives of the Nemo Gonano Award: not only to be a “significant recognition” of the technical and creative skills acquired in the field of teaching, not only to enhance the commitment, dedication and integrity that characterised the professional and personal life of Nemo Gonano and which are important to pass on to the students of the School, but above all to link art to the local area in order to “support skills and stimulate future professionalism in a sector, that of mosaics, which characterises the entire region”.
The President of Rotary Maniago-Spilimbergo Rosanna Rovere, the winning student Matilde Colli,
the President of the Scuola Mosaicisti del Friuli Stefano Lovison.
December 2, 2025
