October 2026
Sophie Calle's first Rome retrospective opens at MAXXI, and Diego Rivera stays at the Capitoline Museums all month. Vermeer's Woman in Blue Reading a Letter leaves Palazzo Barberini on 11 October. A week later Troia and Roma closes at the Colosseum; it's included in the standard ticket, so the visit you were making anyway now comes with a Trojan Horse.
Permanent guide to October 2026 →
MAXXI - National Museum of 21st Century Arts · Opens 16 October
Sophie Calle's first Rome retrospective: more than forty years of photographs and narrative texts about presence, absence and intimacy, in Zaha Hadid's galleries.
Capitoline Museums · Until 13 December
Over 140 works at Villa Caffarelli show how Diego Rivera and his contemporaries built modern Mexican art from pre-Columbian heritage and post-revolution ideals.
MACRO - Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome · Until 15 November
Miriam Cahn's first major museum retrospective in Italy: more than 100 works from the late 1970s on, including the room installations Herumliegen and Familienraum, on the body, war and desire.
Palazzo Barberini - Gallerie Nazionali di Arte Antica · Closes 11 October
Vermeer's Woman in Blue Reading a Letter, on loan from Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum, hangs in a focused display among the Barberini's old masters. Easily the calmest person in Rome.
Colosseum and Roman Forum · Closes 18 October
A monumental Trojan Horse replica leads into over 500 objects, including more than 220 loans from 19 Turkish museums, linking Troy, Aeneas and the founding of Rome. Included with the standard Colosseum ticket.
La Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea (GNAM) · Closes 25 October
A recreation of the 1985 show marking twenty years of FENDI and Karl Lagerfeld, following the work from sketch to production across eight sections. Included with gallery admission, and FENDI, a Roman house, plays at home.
Galleria Borghese · Closes 11 October
Bernini's Apollo and Daphne and Pluto and Proserpina stay where they have always stood, and the show gathers around them: Titian, Rubens, Poussin, Rodin and Brancusi retelling Ovid, co-organised with Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum. Entry is by booked, timed slot.
Fondazione Memmo · Until 1 November
The Zimbabwean painter Portia Zvavahera made these paintings during a Rome residency, and they hang with a site-specific installation in the old stables of Palazzo Ruspoli. Her first institutional show in Italy, on memory, loss and transcendence. Free entry.
Museo di Roma (Palazzo Braschi)
Over 140 works by Keith Haring, including Subway Drawings, 1984 FDR Drive panels, prints, posters and sculptures, with loans from the Nakamura Keith Haring Collection.
MAXXI - National Museum of 21st Century Arts · Free
Six decades of WWF Italia's influence on how the country thinks about nature, from Fulco Pratesi's early vision and the first reserves to major species campaigns. In the Corner MAXXI.
Palazzo delle Esposizioni
Avedon's portrait series of workers, drifters and townspeople of the American West, commissioned by the Amon Carter Museum in 1979. Curated by Clément Chéroux of the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson.
Colosseum and Roman Forum
Bill Viola's 1995 video installation The Greeting, inspired by Pontormo's Visitation, shown in the Byzantine frescoed church of Santa Maria Antiqua in the Roman Forum.
La Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea (GNAM)
Over 200 photographs by fashion duo Luigi & Iango exploring the body as a surface for desire, conflict, vulnerability and transformation, examining identity and the human figure in contemporary visual culture.
Museo di Roma (Palazzo Braschi) · Free
Original documents, photographs and objects from eleven family archives of the Fondazione Museo della Shoah trace the persecution of Italian Jews from 1938 to the Liberation.
Palazzo delle Esposizioni
Istat's centenary show: a century of Italian statistics, with an immersive hall retelling the country's history through data, plus games and visualisations.
Colosseum and Roman Forum
Exhibition on Sappho of Lesbos in the Farnese Aviaries on the Palatine, set between the historical poet and the legendary one, with vases, sculpture, paintings and manuscripts.
MAXXI - National Museum of 21st Century Arts
Mexican architect Tatiana Bilbao turns a MAXXI hall into a landscape to explore and inhabit, inspired by the Mesoamerican ball game and built for connection.
MAXXI - National Museum of 21st Century Arts
Sophie Calle's first Rome retrospective spans more than forty years of work probing presence, absence and intimacy through photography and narrative.
Castel Sant'Angelo - Museo Nazionale
Documents, costumes, screenplays and archive material trace Visconti's career, 120 years after his birth, with a focus on Il Gattopardo.
Chiostro del Bramante
Curated by Suzanne Landau: 190 works from the 16th century to today on food as memory, language and art form, including Bompas & Parr's Pasta Shell Grotto and Yinka Shonibare.
Galleria Borghese
Dossier exhibition setting Titian's Annunciation, on loan from Treviso Cathedral, beside the Titians in the Borghese collection, for the 450th anniversary of his death.
La Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea (GNAM)
Ten loans by Giorgio de Chirico shown with the gallery's Metaphysical collection, plus architectural drawings and photographs that read Rome as a "metaphysical city".
La Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea (GNAM)
Ennio Calabria's 1992 "Ambiguità dell'intravisto. Donna e mare", donated to the collection, shown with three other large canvases by the Nuova Figurazione painter.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Castel Sant'Angelo - Museo Nazionale
Over 70 finds from Herculaneum's storerooms, in seven sections, show everyday life in the city buried by Vesuvius in AD 79, including a carbonised loaf of bread.
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.
Museo Carlo Bilotti
An international group show of around 30 works — video, paintings, sculpture and installations — exploring contemporary domesticity through a feminist, political and social lens, touching on housing, migration and environmental crisis.
MACRO - Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome
Nine projects by IED interior design students reimagine MACRO as a museum open to everyday life, with spaces for learning, work and collective rituals.
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.
MACRO - Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome
British artist and composer Robin Rimbaud deconstructs and reassembles dialogue, sound effects and music from Antonioni's 1962 film L'eclisse, layered with ambient recordings of Rome's streets into a contemplative acoustic fabric.
MACRO - Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome
A 16mm video installation exploring the deconstruction of stardom in Italian cinema through the artist's personal search for Monica Vitti's burial site, weaving family memory and film history into an intimate mother-daughter dialogue.
Museo Carlo Bilotti
Around forty works by Marina Bindella — paintings, woodcuts, watercolours and large polyptych installations made from 2020 onward — exploring mark-making as a generative principle of form, light, space and cosmic structure.
National Roman Museum - Palazzo Massimo
Immersive video-art and AI installation on the Roman presence in Egypt's western desert oases, with archaeological finds, in the Octagonal Hall of the Baths of Diocletian (Museo dell'Arte Salvata).
Vatican Museums · Free
Deluigi's abstract "Litanies of the Virgin Mary (Homage to Mondrian)" with its 1972 silkscreen portfolio, a sketch notebook and two Rubelli textile panels. At the Papal Palace of Castel Gandolfo.
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.
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.
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.
Castel Sant'Angelo - Museo Nazionale
The Castellan's apartment hosts a selection of paintings by 19th-century Lithuanian Romantic painter Kanutas Ruseckas, part of the Italy-Lithuania 2026 cultural year, exploring Rome's pull on European artists.
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.
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.
Galleria Continua Roma · Free
Two-artist show pairing new marble work by Hank Willis Thomas, such as I AM (I AM AM I; I AM HUMAN...), with vintage Man Ray prints including a 1952 possible self portrait.
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.
National Roman Museum - Palazzo Massimo
Three monumental Roman bronzes pulled from the Tiber in 1878, once decorating the ancient Ponte di Valentiniano: a diademed male head, a gilded toga-clad figure, and the wing of a winged Victory.
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.
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.
MACRO - Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome
The pioneering photographer's first major Italian museum retrospective, presenting seven foundational 1970s bodies of work that intertwined artistic practice with visual anthropology and social observation.
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.
A short note now and then when something new opens worth your time.
