December 2026
December opens Frontiere at MAXXI on the 18th and closes two shows early in the month: Titian's Annunciation leaves the Borghese on the 8th, Diego Rivera leaves Villa Caffarelli on the 13th. Keith Haring's mock New York subway station is in Palazzo Braschi, beside Piazza Navona's Christmas market. Seven picks.
MAXXI - National Museum of 21st Century ArtsOpens 18 December
A round room is given over to EXIT, Diller Scofidio + Renfro's "geopolitical" animation. Co-curated by a geopolitics journalist rather than an architect, the show asks how design answers conflict, migration and climate, inside a Zaha Hadid building.
La Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea (GNAM)Until 4 April 2027
You can lie on the stone beds: quartz, amethyst and agate structures built to be used, not looked at. Beside them sit the performances that made her name, from Imponderabilia to MoMA's The Artist is Present.
Museo dell'Ara PacisUntil 2 May 2027
Wooden panels painted to be laid over the faces of the dead. Egypt has lent almost every Fayum portrait it holds, and none had left the country before. Jewellery from Pompeii lets you match the painted earrings.
Palazzo delle EsposizioniUntil 31 January 2027
A beekeeper covered in bees; miners, drifters and waitresses against the same white backdrop. All 110 prints from the 1985 book, a first for Italy. Avvenire called them "potenti e dolenti", powerful and mournful.
Museo di Roma (Palazzo Braschi)Until 11 April 2027
Photos of the mural Haring painted below Palazzo delle Esposizioni's steps in 1984, scrubbed off in 1992, then a mock New York subway station hung with his chalk drawings. His final bronze altarpiece stands in the palace chapel.
Capitoline MuseumsCloses 13 December
In 1920 Rivera drew the Capitoline's own bust of Epicurus; a facsimile of the sheet hangs in the same museum as the marble. Thirty of the 140-plus works are his, the rest Kahlo, Orozco, Siqueiros and Tamayo.
Galleria BorgheseCloses 8 December
Restorers found Titian's signature under later paint at the foot of this Annunciation, from Treviso Cathedral. It hangs beside Sacred and Profane Love: one loan, sized for a normal Borghese visit.
MAXXI - National Museum of 21st Century Arts
A display from the MAXXI Collection in Gallery 3, curated by Luigia Lonardelli, presenting works as small pieces of fabric to be sewn together, fragile yet monumental.
MAXXI - National Museum of 21st Century Arts
Archive drawings and images of the 1960 Olympic Village, where athletes of many nations lived side by side, read as a case study in cultural diplomacy through sport.
MAXXI - National Museum of 21st Century Arts
The exhibition examines how architects respond to global instability, redefining design's role and responsibilities amid contemporary geopolitical uncertainty.
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.
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.
National Roman Museum - Palazzo Massimo
Over sixty years of technology and Italian cultural heritage, from 1960s computing to the Ecomic digital ecosystem, threaded together by a knowledge graph. Ministry of Culture show at Palazzo Massimo.
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 RomaFree
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.
MAXXI - National Museum of 21st Century Arts
A trilogy of films and a series of photographs on identity, power and belonging, centred on activist and YouTuber Nasim Aghdam and the tensions of the American Dream.
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.
MAXXI - National Museum of 21st Century Arts
Part of the "extra MAXXI" programme, pairing Futurist masterpieces by artists like Boccioni and Balla with contemporary works responding to their legacy of speed and simultaneity.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
MAXXI - National Museum of 21st Century Arts
The full archive of Genoese photographer Nanda Lanfranco, loaned to MAXXI in 2024, tracing her record of the international contemporary art scene from the 1970s to the 2000s.
MAXXI - National Museum of 21st Century Arts
An interdisciplinary exhibition on Gordon Matta-Clark's radical architectural interventions and creative practice, from his experimental New York years to his influential work in Italy.
MAXXI - National Museum of 21st Century Arts
The fifth edition of MAXXI's prize supporting young artists in collaboration with Bvlgari; for the first time all three finalists — Chiara Bersani, Adji Dieye and Margherita Moscardini — are women, with the winning work joining the permanent collection.
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".
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.
La Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea (GNAM)
Marking the artist's 80th birthday, an expanded version of the Venice Biennale show pairing historical performance works (Imponderabilia, Balkan Baroque, The Artist is Present) with a selection of her Transitory Objects. Curated by Shai Baitel and Andrea Tarsia.
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.
Museo dell'Ara Pacis
Over 110 works, including nearly 50 Fayum mummy portraits lent by Egypt, the Louvre, the Getty and the Met, set against Roman portraiture in marble and plaster.
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.
