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.

Nibbi was born on 29 April 1896 in Fermo, Italy, to Anna (née Spinelli) and Pasquale Nibbi, a cooper. They moved to nearby Porto San Giorgio, also in Fermo province on the Adriatic Sea. There, Gino completed studies in accountancy at the Technical Institute of Ascoli Piceno on 2 September 1915. Serving in artillery as a lieutenant in World War I he was decorated for bravery, but the experience convinced him to become a pacifist. 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. Nibbi's own interest in contemporary art developed through his friendship, from 1920, with the painter and Fermo art teacher Osvaldo Licini who in Paris had met Picasso, Cocteau, Modigliani and Cendrars and exhibited with Kandinsky, and who drew Nibbi to the French avant-garde, an interest shared by another friend Acruto Vitali.

Palmer associates Nibbi with other expatriates Yosl Bergner, Danila Vassilieff, Peter Herbst, Gerd Buchdahl, Franz Philipp and Ursula Hoff, whose ‘ordeals in Fascist and Nazi Europe…manifested in their relocation to Australia.’ Haese is more specific: '[Nibbi's] reasons for migrating were to do with both politics and art. 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.' Nibbi's friend Licini was jailed for his protests against the fascists, and Nibbi obtained authorisation to emigrate only through the intervention of journalist Margherita Sarfatti. Artieri confuses Gino Nibbi with Gino Bibbi, an 'individualist anarchist' implicated in assisting Gino Lucetti's attempted assassination of Mussolini in 1926. As a pacifist, Nibbi was, in September 1939, a signatory on an open letter of thanks to Mussolini for declaring Italy neutral, though 9 months later Il Duce joined the Axis in WW2 and declared war on the Allies.

Before leaving Italy Nibbi edited the anti-Marinettian Futurist and Dadaist Le Pagine during its short life 1916–1917, and was a regular contributor in the 1920s to La Fiera Letteraria, the Italian magazine of letters, sciences and arts (later titled, in Rome, l'Italia Letteraria).

In 1926 Nibbi emigrated to Melbourne, followed by his family in 1927. From thence during 1931-2 he undertook a pilgrimage to Tahiti and the Society Islands pursuing his interest in Paul Gauguin's life in the South Pacific, seeking 'memories [of Gauguin] surviving among the people,’ and writing about his discoveries for a number of Italian newspapers, as well as for the Herald, and about Ra'latea in the Leeward Islands (Polynesia), and Tasmania's picturesque delights for L'Illustrazione Italiana.

With Italian publishers the results appeared in The Islands of Happiness (Milan, 1934). 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. With a style rich in different tones, the author now describes the wonderful landscapes of those islands not wrongly called "of happiness"; now instead, even if briefly, or almost in passing, gives news of a historical or geographical and economic nature (without being cloying), now he tries to penetrate the soul of the natives of those strange countries, perfectly managing to give us an exact sensation of their linear psychology; Il Giornale cites also comments in the Roman fortnightly magazine Augustea of 15 July 1934: 'He is a "personal" narrator, who, while observing minutely, gives a certain fairy-tale feel to his page, which one might say is a little hallucinatory, even when it is seasoned with a skeptical realism. This is not the classic "travel book", it is a kind of confession that the author makes of himself after his experiences there.' Milan's L'Ambrosiano rated the volume among the three best of the month.

Returning to Melbourne in 1928 he established, as Sendy notes, at 166 Little Collins Street, near the corner of Exhibition Street, close to the famous Victoria Coffee Palace and a few doors from F. W. Cheshire's, an avant-garde literary and art shop, his Leonardo Art Shop. O'Grady places it 'at 170 Little Collins Street, behind George's department store.' Meanwhile, Elvira taught Italian at the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music and the Berlitz School of Languages.

The shop was advertised in 1931 as: