What's on in Rome

La Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea (GNAM)

Second edition of a competition for Italian art-high-school students on sustainability and the energy transition: eight finalist sculptures, chosen from 134 proposals by 232 students across 57 schools, exploring circular economy and youth's role in climate action.

Galleria Borghese

A film installation by Isaac Julien in the Uccelliera pavilion, staged within the Metamorphoses exhibition: mirrors multiply and fragment the projected image of two celestial guides moving across eras and landscapes.

La Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea (GNAM)

A donation from Italian abstract painter Madalena Negrone, centred on the 2025 oil "Origine" alongside six recent works including the five-metre "Blue 5172" and the four-part "Egg" series, curated by Guicciardo Sassoli de Bianchi.

Capitoline Museums

A Palazzo Caffarelli show of more than seventy paintings, drawings and documents exploring Giorgio Vasari's career and his pivotal relationship with Rome.

Castel Sant'Angelo - Museo Nazionale

Marking 150 years since Duilio Cambellotti's birth, this show reopens the castle's Cambellotti Rooms (decorated 1925-26) and gathers his textiles and decorative work where matter becomes form.

Chiostro del Bramante

A sweeping show on nature as a living, ever-changing universe, across three sections (Art and Ecology, Art and Science, Art and Politics), blending 17th-century works with contemporary and AI-generated art.

Museo Carlo Bilotti

Photography show drawn from Valerio De Paolis's collection, in three sections on the female form, the city and art itself, presenting international photographic masterpieces publicly for the first time.

Gagosian Rome · Free

Nearly fifty lifetime prints by Francesca Woodman, many never before exhibited, exploring her ties to Surrealism and her 1977-78 time in Rome through staged bodies in dilapidated interiors.

Castel Sant'Angelo - Museo Nazionale

Archival documents from the Roman State Archives paired with historical knives from a private collection reveal everyday life, conflict and social dynamics in papal Rome through judicial records and marginalia spanning 1611-1865, shown in the Bastione di San Marco.

Galleria Borghese

A major project with Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum, built around Bernini's Apollo and Daphne and Pluto and Proserpina, tracing Ovid's myths through Titian, Rubens, Poussin, Rodin and Brancusi.

MACRO - Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome

The long-running women's video-art programme, with Nathalie Djurberg as guest "Goodmother", confronts fear across films, performances and animations spanning personal, social and political registers.

MACRO - Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome

An audio-room project built around poet Amelia Rosselli's own 1980s-90s recordings, turning her multilingual voice into an acoustic experience of writing that resists any single tradition.

MACRO - Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome

An "ideal library" of over a thousand volumes traces eight decades of Italy's leading literary prize, framing it as a seismograph of the country's cultural and linguistic change.

MAXXI - National Museum of 21st Century Arts

Over 300 works by more than 130 artists trace the ironic, tragicomic sensibility running through Italian art and culture from the post-war period to the present day.

Museo dell'Ara Pacis

A retrospective of over 200 photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe, tracing his pursuit of pure form across portraits, flowers, the body and dialogues with classical sculpture. Curated by Denis Curti.

MAXXI - National Museum of 21st Century Arts

An illuminated rooftop installation whose lights flare in real time whenever lightning strikes somewhere across Italy, connecting art and visitors to the energy of nature.

Palazzo Barberini - Gallerie Nazionali di Arte Antica

Vermeer's 'Woman in Blue Reading a Letter', on loan from Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum, comes to Palazzo Barberini for a focused display of the Dutch master's intimate light.

Vatican Museums

Twentieth-century paintings, sculptures, drawings and prints from intellectual Leone Piccioni's collection, including Burri, Morandi and Guttuso, donated to the Vatican in 2024. In the Borgia Tower rooms.

Colosseum and Roman Forum

Over 300 artefacts from Italian museums alongside more than 220 works on loan from 19 Turkish museums trace the mythological and historical ties between Troy and Rome. The itinerary, introduced by a monumental replica of the Trojan Horse, connects the heritage of ancient Ilion with the myth of Aeneas and the founding of Rome.

MAXXI - National Museum of 21st Century Arts

A seventieth-anniversary retrospective of the acclaimed comic artist Andrea Pazienza, gathering his strips, sketches and archival material across chronologically arranged galleries.

Colosseum and Roman Forum

A 60-minute guided nocturnal tour of the Colosseum's arena floor and underground levels, paired with a new exhibition using holographic projections to explore ancient spectacles and gladiatorial combat.

La Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea (GNAM)

Recreation of the landmark 1985 show celebrating twenty years of collaboration between FENDI and Karl Lagerfeld, tracing the creative process from sketches through production across eight sections.

Galleria Lorcan O'Neill · Free

Solo exhibition by American artist Kiki Smith at Galleria Lorcan O'Neill's Rome gallery, on view from 4 May to 31 October 2026.

MACRO - Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome

A single-channel video and spatial installation exposes the hidden labour behind AI, following Kurdish-Syrian refugees who classify images for AI training while facing automated drone warfare.

Capitoline Museums

An exhibition in Palazzo dei Conservatori tracing the angelic figure across Western art from antiquity to today, through three sections: messengers, guardians and wanderers.

Fondazione Memmo · Free

Zimbabwean painter Portia Zvavahera's first institutional show in Italy: a site-specific installation and a new body of paintings made during a Rome residency, exploring memory, loss and transcendence.

MAXXI - National Museum of 21st Century Arts

An 80-year survey of Italian architectural ideas, projects and visions, tracing eight decades of the Republic from the post-war years to contemporary practice and future scenarios.

MACRO - Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome

The Swiss artist's first major museum retrospective in Italy: 100+ works from the late 1970s on, anchored by the room installations Herumliegen and Familienraum, exploring the body, war and desire.

Centrale Montemartini

Archivio Luce multimedia show on Rome as a fashion capital, 1955-1975: 150 photographs, films, fabrics and 27 original garments by Valentino, Fendi, Forquet and the Fontana sisters.

Capitoline Museums

A retrospective at Villa Caffarelli of over 140 works showing how Diego Rivera and his contemporaries forged modern Mexican art from pre-Columbian heritage and post-revolution ideals.

Capitoline Museums

A 1:1, roughly 13-metre reconstruction of the 4th-century colossus of Emperor Constantine, displayed in the garden of Villa Caffarelli using casts of the surviving original fragments.

Museo dell'Ara Pacis

An immersive evening videomapping experience that restores the altar's original polychromy, animating its marble reliefs with light, music and multilingual narration on a roughly 45-minute route inside the monument.

La Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea (GNAM)

GNAMC's Artist of the Year turns the entrance hall into a year-long participatory lab, with 40+ works including four monumental 'Theatre of Commons' tapestries, drawings and a light sculpture.

Capitoline Museums

A Pinacoteca display using scientific imaging to reveal the creative process behind unfinished paintings by artists such as Palma il Vecchio, Guido Reni and Garofalo.

MAXXI - National Museum of 21st Century Arts

Barcelona and New York studio TAKK fills MAXXI's lobby with six mobile sculptural elements made of low-carbon and living materials, exploring new ways of coexistence.

Capitoline Museums

A long-running display in Palazzo Clementino of over 660 polychrome marbles from the Imperial age, from the Santarelli collection, illustrating Rome's history through coloured stone.