In the Flaminio district, behind the Auditorium, a grey concrete building steps out of the building line with a volume suspended over the heads of passers-by. It has no main facade, no flight of steps, and you cannot work out where the door is until you walk around it.
This is the MAXXI, the national museum of twenty-first century arts, and you have to approach it knowing something the other museums in Rome do not ask of you: here the most important work is the building. The collection, on the other hand, is seen through a display that changes. You will not find a room with the masterpieces always in place, as at the Galleria Borghese, but a route recomposed not long ago, which in two years will be a different one.
We start from the architecture of Zaha Hadid, which is permanent, and end with the museum’s three collections, which are less permanent than they sound.
Where is the collection, in a museum that stages it from scratch every two years?
Let’s begin!
1. Zaha Hadid’s building
The international competition was announced in July 1998 and the Anglo-Iraqi architect Zaha Hadid won it at the end of February 1999, with a project occupying the site of the former Montello barracks, between via Masaccio and via Guido Reni. The works took almost ten years and the museum was inaugurated on 28 May 2010.
It is twenty-seven thousand square metres, and the first thing to understand is that this is not a building made of rooms. It is made of routes: curved concrete walls that run alongside one another, overlap and cross, and that widen at five points to form the galleries. Walk without a map for the first ten minutes and let it take you where it wants, because that is how it was designed.
On 2 October 2010, a few months after opening, the MAXXI won the RIBA Stirling Prize, the most important British architecture award: it was the first time for Hadid’s practice, which had reached the shortlist three times before without winning.
2. The roof, and why the rooms feel like passages
Look up, in every room. The ceiling is not a ceiling: it is a continuous system of beams, skylights and louvres that runs the whole length of the building and brings adjustable daylight right into the upper floors.
Why would a museum, which normally protects its works from light, cover itself in glass?
Because Hadid designed a space meant to be crossed, not contemplated standing still. The blades of light follow the direction of the curved walls and push you forward: the roof is the reason why, inside, you always feel you are in a passage and never in a room. It is also the reason why displays are difficult here, as everyone who has worked on one knows.
3. The piazza, which costs nothing
Under the cantilevered volumes, in front of the entrance, there is a public square continuous with the street. No ticket is needed: you just walk in.
It draws less attention than anything else and it is the part that has changed the neighbourhood most, because it added an open space where a closed barracks used to be. If you arrive early or if the museum is crowded, start here: from underneath you can see how the volumes hold their balance, and from the inside that reading is impossible.
4. The Large Glass: the collection rehung by an artist
The MAXXI has stopped displaying its own collection by itself: it calls in an outside artist or thinker and has them reinterpret it. The display running as I write, in Gallery 4, is called The Large Glass: it is signed by the American artist Alex Da Corte, it opened on 13 December 2024 and it closes on 11 October 2026.
The works are not lined up by date or by movement: they are set side by side for resemblances and echoes, and the thread was chosen by Da Corte. There are works by Francis Alÿs, Massimo Bartolini, Alighiero Boetti, Luigi Ghirri, Giuseppe Penone and Kara Walker, plus material from the architecture archive and photographs.
Bear this in mind before you travel: if you are after a particular work from the MAXXI collection, check on the website that it is on view. Here the right question is not «where is it», it is «is it there at all».
5. The architecture archives: Nervi, Scarpa, Aldo Rossi
The architecture collection is the part of the MAXXI that no other Italian museum has, and it amounts to more than a hundred archive holdings of architects and engineers from the early twentieth century to today: among them Pier Luigi Nervi, Carlo Scarpa and Aldo Rossi.
These are not paintings: they are drawings, sketches, models, site photographs, letters. When you find a selection on show, look at Nervi’s calculation drawings, because there you see something rare, the point at which engineering turns into form. The rest can be consulted by appointment, at the Centro Archivi di Architettura, and for a thesis or a piece of research that is worth the trip more than the visit is.
6. The photography collection
It is the youngest of the three: around two thousand four hundred art photographs, gathered since 2003 through commissions, prizes and acquisition campaigns.
The logic is not to buy famous photographs, it is to commission new ones on Italian subjects: the landscape, the outskirts, building sites, work. That is why this collection holds images that exist nowhere else, and it is also the section that most often feeds the temporary exhibitions.
What you will not find, and why it is worth knowing beforehand
The MAXXI does not have a permanent collection on permanent display. Its three hundred and more artworks rotate, the archives are seen in samples, and most of the space is taken up by temporary exhibitions: when you plan the visit, the exhibition programme is the real content of the day, not a side dish.
There is also something that explains why you always see the same two or three photographs of this building. Italy has no freedom of panorama, and Hadid’s architecture is a protected work of authorship: free images of the interiors and exteriors barely circulate, and the ones you find are almost all the museum’s own. It is also the reason why this article has fewer photographs than the others in this series.
Practical information
Details checked on 16 September 2026 on the official MAXXI website. Prices and opening hours change: check again before you travel.
Tickets. Full price is 15 euros at the desk and 14 euros online, and covers all the exhibitions on show plus the display of the collection. The reduced ticket costs 12 euros, 11 online, and is for young people between 18 and 25, groups of at least fifteen and holders of certain partner cards. Free admission. Under-18s go in free, as do people with disabilities, university students of art and architecture from European Union countries (but only from Tuesday to Friday, holidays excluded), one teacher for every ten students, holders of the myMAXXI card and anybody on their own birthday. The card. The annual pass is called open and costs 18 euros, three euros more than a single admission: if you think you might come back even once, it pays for itself. Opening hours. Tuesday to Sunday 11:00-19:00. Closed on Mondays. The ticket office closes an hour earlier. Getting there. The museum is at via Guido Reni 4A. Tram 2 from piazzale Flaminio stops at Apollodoro, a few steps away; the nearest metro A station is Flaminio, where you pick up the tram. How long to allow. The building, the piazza and the display of the collection need an hour and a half. Allow three hours if there are two or three temporary exhibitions open, which is the norm.
Where to go from here
The most useful comparison is with the other great museum of Italian contemporary art in a reused building: the Madre in Naples, where the rooms were commissioned from the artists one by one. On the Roman side, the collection of twentieth-century Italian art that the MAXXI does not have is at the National Gallery of Modern Art, a quarter of an hour away by tram.
To find your way among all the others, with the closing days, there is Museums in Rome: the 8 you should not miss.
Photo credits: atrium of the MAXXI by Alessio Lin (CC0); roof by Elenuar58 (CC BY-SA 4.0), from Wikimedia Commons; entrance by Jean-Pierre Dalbéra (CC BY 2.0).
