Must-See Exhibitions
in Rome
March & April 2026

Nestled on Piazza Venezia in the shadow of the Altare della Patria, the magnificent Palazzo Bonaparte — once home to Napoleon's mother Letizia — is hosting one of the most anticipated cultural events of the Roman spring: a breathtaking survey of three titans of Japanese printmaking.

The exhibition brings together over 200 original works by Katsushika Hokusai, Utagawa Hiroshige, and Kitagawa Utamaro, drawn from prestigious private and institutional collections around the world. Visitors are guided through the poetic landscapes, dramatic seascapes, and tender portraits that made the ukiyo-e tradition one of the most influential art movements in history — and a key inspiration for Impressionists from Monet to Van Gogh.

What makes this exhibition particularly special is its setting. The baroque interiors of Palazzo Bonaparte, with their gilded ceilings and dramatic light, create a sensational counterpoint to the serene precision of Japanese woodblock art. This dialogue between East and West, baroque and zen, feels entirely unique to Rome.

The Capitoline Museums — perched atop the Capitoline Hill in the very heart of ancient Rome and designed by none other than Michelangelo — are dedicating this spring to the revolutionary genius of Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio. This landmark retrospective traces how a young, tempestuous painter from Milan arrived in Rome in 1592 and completely reinvented Western art.

The exhibition draws on loans from the Vatican Museums, the Borghese Gallery, the Uffizi, the National Gallery of London, and the Louvre, presenting a once-in-a-generation concentration of Caravaggio's greatest works in the city where he created most of them. Rome is, in every sense, the home of Caravaggio's genius — and this exhibition makes that relationship vivid and undeniable.

Special late-night openings every Friday and Saturday allow visitors to experience Caravaggio's paintings under dramatically reduced, candlelit conditions — recreating something close to the way his 17th-century patrons first encountered them.

The grand Palazzo delle Esposizioni on Via Nazionale — Rome's most prestigious public exhibition space — is dedicating its main galleries to the Vienna Secession and its most celebrated figure, Gustav Klimt. This is the most comprehensive exhibition of Klimt's work ever mounted in Italy, and it arrives in Rome at a moment of renewed fascination with his golden, sensuous aesthetic.

The show features over 180 works — paintings, drawings, photographs, posters, and applied arts — tracing the movement from its 1897 founding manifesto to its influence on fashion, design, and contemporary art. At its heart are six major paintings by Klimt himself, including studies for the Beethoven Frieze , on loan from the Österreichische Galerie Belvedere in Vienna.

A particularly beautiful section of the exhibition explores Klimt's friendship with Emilie Flöge, the fashion designer he loved for 27 years, and the remarkable way in which their aesthetic sensibilities intertwined — producing garments and paintings that feel as radical today as they did in 1900.

The Galleria Borghese — one of the world's great art museums, set in a jewel-like villa inside Villa Borghese park — requires no introduction. But this spring it outdoes itself with a focused exhibition dedicated to Gian Lorenzo Bernini, the sculptor, architect, and urban visionary who shaped Rome more profoundly than almost any individual before or since.

The exhibition reunites, for the first time, all five of the great marble groups Bernini carved in his twenties for Cardinal Scipione Borghese — works of such technical audacity and psychological intensity that contemporaries literally refused to believe a human hand had made them. Alongside these permanent masterpieces, the Borghese is displaying a series of rarely seen terracotta studies, architectural drawings, and private correspondence that reveal Bernini's creative process in extraordinary detail.

Designed by the late, great Zaha Hadid and opened in 2010, MAXXI is itself a work of art — its swooping concrete interiors and fluid circulation routes making it one of the most exciting buildings in contemporary Rome. This spring, its permanent collection is augmented by a major thematic exhibition charting the richest 25 years in Italian contemporary art.

The show features over 130 works by 60 artists, from early-millennium painting and sculpture to the digital installations, video art, and urban interventions that define the current Italian scene. It is, in many ways, a coming-of-age story for a generation of Italian artists who emerged after the end of the Cold War and before the rise of social media — and whose work now stands at a remarkable crossroads.

For visitors more accustomed to Rome's ancient and Renaissance glories, MAXXI offers a genuinely thrilling alternative perspective: proof that Italy's creative life is as vital and provocative as it has ever been.

The Scuderie del Quirinale — the former papal stables opposite the Presidential Palace on the Quirinal Hill — has long been Rome's home for blockbuster art exhibitions. This spring it turns to Raphael Sanzio, one of the three great figures of the High Renaissance, with an exhibition dedicated to his relationship with Rome: the city that was his laboratory, his patron, and ultimately his tomb.

Raphael arrived in Rome in 1508, summoned by Pope Julius II to decorate the Vatican Stanze. He was 25. By the time he died 12 years later, he had transformed the visual language of Western art — and Rome would never look the same again. This exhibition, organised in partnership with the Vatican Museums and the Royal Collection Trust, traces that transformation through paintings, drawings, architectural plans, and letters.