Maximilian Fabiani, commonly known as Max Fabiani (, ) (29 April 1865 – 12 August 1962) was a cosmopolitan trilingual architect and town planner of mixed Italian-Austrian ancestry, born in the village of Kobdilj near Štanjel on the Karst Plateau, County of Gorizia and Gradisca, in present-day Slovenia. Together with Ciril Metod Koch and Ivan Vancaš, he introduced the Vienna Secession style of architecture (a type of Art Nouveau) in Slovenia. Life Fabiani was born to Antonio Fabiani, a Friulian latifondist from Paularo of Bergamasque ancestry, and Charlotte von Kofler, a Triestine aristocrat of Tyrolean origin. He grew up in a cosmopolitan trilingual environment: besides Italian, the language of his family, and Slovene, the language of his social environment, he learned German at a very young age. He came from a wealthy family that could afford to provide a good education for its 14 children. He attended elementary school in Kobdilj, and the German and Slovene-language Realschule in Ljubljana, where he was the best student in the class after seven years. He later moved to Vienna, where he attended architecture courses at the Vienna University of Technology. After earning his degree in 1889, a scholarship enabled him to travel for three years (1892–1894) to Asia Minor and through most of Europe. He was married and had two children; his son Lorenzo Fabiani (1907–1973) was an agronomist and journalist and known anti-fascist. In 1917, Fabiani was named professor at the University of Vienna, and in 1919 one of his pupils, Ivan Vurnik, offered him a teaching position at the newly established University of Ljubljana, Fabiani however refused the offer, quit the teaching position in Vienna, and decided to settle in Gorizia, which had been annexed to the Kingdom of Italy, thus becoming an Italian citizen. On 15 May 1921—less than a year after the burning of the Slovenian National Hall in Trieste by the Italian fascists, which he had designed—Fabiani became a member of the Italian fascist movement. The reason why he joined the party and his political activity in the following years remain unclear and controversial. At the same time his son was jailed because of his anti-fascist activities. In late 1935, Fabiani (at age 70) accepted the nomination for mayor (podestà) of his native village of Štanjel. He remained mayor during World War II, using his knowledge of German language and his cultural acquaintances to convince the German troops