August 2026
August at a glance: 0 exhibitions opening, 9 closing, and 24 more on view across the city.

Galleria Continua Roma · Free
Solo show by Cuban artist Carlos Garaicoa, pairing sculptural installations such as Contrapeso (Ciudad Plomada) with botanical drawings and mixed-media works in graphite, watercolour and digital print.
La Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea (GNAM)
Retrospective of Bauhaus-trained painter Max Peiffer Watenphul (1896-1976) across five rooms and around 80 works, shown alongside pieces by Klee, Schlemmer, Dix and Jawlensky from his own collection.

La Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea (GNAM)
Around 80 works survey Bauhaus-trained painter Max Peiffer Watenphul (1896-1976), whose colourful landscapes and still lifes chart a personal path through the 20th-century European avant-garde.

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.

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
Three prize-winning artists born in the early 1990s counter digital perfection with glitches, failure and DIY tactics, probing human agency within automated and surveilled systems.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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)
Year-long focus on participatory artist Marinella Senatore as GNAMC's Artist of the Year 2026. A dedicated room presents over 40 drawings, collages and tapestries alongside talks, workshops and public events.
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.

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 exhibition examines how architects respond to global instability, redefining design's role and responsibilities amid contemporary geopolitical uncertainty.
A short note now and then when something new opens worth your time.