September 2026
September 2026 at a glance: 11 exhibitions opened, 9 closed, and 30 more were on view across the city.

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

Vatican MuseumsFree
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.

Galleria BorghesePast
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)Past
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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

Chiostro del BramantePast
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.

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

Museo Carlo BilottiPast
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 RomeFreePast
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 NazionalePast
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.

MAXXI - National Museum of 21st Century ArtsPast
Part of the "extra MAXXI" programme, the exhibition uses St. Francis's vision as a lens for reinterpreting Italian contemporary art from the postwar period to today.

MACRO - Museum of Contemporary Art of RomePast
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 RomePast
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.

MAXXI - National Museum of 21st Century ArtsPast
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 PacisPast
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.

Castel Sant'Angelo - Museo NazionalePast
Reopening the restored Farnese Rooms as a Renaissance papal apartment, this display unveils a first selection of the castle's historic arms and armour as instruments of ingenuity and power.

Galleria BorghesePast
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.

Palazzo Barberini - Gallerie Nazionali di Arte AnticaPast
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 MuseumsPast
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.

MAXXI - National Museum of 21st Century ArtsPast
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 ForumPast
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.

Castel Sant'Angelo - Museo NazionalePast
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)Past
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'NeillFree
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 MemmoFree
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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.