There is a photograph - among those taken by Ernani Orcorte - in which one can glimpse, in a courtyard that has become a home for large sculptures, the tiny figure of a man walking: Nicola Loi. We are in Casalbeltrame, a small village between Novara and Vercelli, a land of rice paddies. Here, in 2006, Loi began to build his citadel of sculpture, alongside the 18th-century villa (intended as a gallery of plaster casts for 20th-century Italian sculpture) and the park previously owned by the Counts Bracorens Savoiroux.
He was the point of reference in Italy for the works of the greatest 20thcentury sculptors
The visionary project, Materima, was an evolution of an intuition from twenty years prior, when in 1986 he founded Studio Copernico in Milan. He dedicated himself to the dissemination and promotion of the standard-bearers of Italian sculpture - Marino Marini, Arnaldo Pomodoro, Francesco Messina, Giacomo Manzù, Giuliano Vangi, Augusto Perez, among others - through public exhibitions (notably those at Forte del Belvedere in Florence and Venaria Reale in Turin) and monographic publications. He also founded a prize for young sculptors.
In 2006, he began realizing the visionary project of Materima, a citadel of sculpture in the Novara area
The journey of Nicola Loi began in Turin in the 1960s. From 1967, he organized exhibitions of paintings and sculptures and became a publisher of graphic portfolios, until the 1973 Düsseldorf Fair revealed to him the fundamental international value of contemporary Italian sculptors. He founded La Colomba gallery and decided to deal primarily with plastic arts, soon becoming the reference point for artists and collectors in the field. Those who spent time with Nicola Loi - who passed away in Milan on January 4, 2026, after an illness faced stoically - remember his passion, his gentleness, his humanity, and his absolute dedication to his activity. He traveled tirelessly by car and received artists and enthusiasts at Casalbeltrame, especially on weekends, proud to show the works and to introduce guests to the local cuisine (Castelmagno risotto and panissa vercellese). Anyone who had the chance to visit his citadel of sculpture and speak with him leaves with a legacy: there are visionary and courageous men who conceive a dream and fight strenuously to achieve what would have discouraged many, but not him - a “little big man” convinced that Italian sculpture still has major cards to play on the world stage.
He organized major exhibitions for artists like Marini, Pomodoro, Messina, Manzù, and Vangi among others, in important public spaces
