There are 12 exhibitions on in Rome worth the trip. I checked the dates, the venues and the opening hours one by one, on the museums’ own pages.
Last checked: 27 July 2026
20 March to 6 September 2026
We know Vasari as the man who wrote the Lives and so invented art history. This show looks at the other Vasari, the one who painted, and at his uneasy relationship with a city that intimidated him. Extended to 6 September.
14 March to 6 September 2026
The new chapter of the flowers project widens its gaze to nature as a whole: plants, animals and sea creatures, laid out inside Bramante’s Renaissance cloister, a two minute walk from Piazza Navona.
2 May to 13 September 2026
Before he directed, Scola drew. Screenplays, cartoons and archive material from the director of We All Loved Each Other So Much, shown in a palazzo that stands in exactly the Rome he filmed.
24 April to 27 September 2026
Panels, sketches, letters and archive papers by an artist who told the story of Italy in the 1970s and 1980s better than many historians, with a line that is still astonishing decades on. He died at thirty two.
29 May to 4 October 2026
Mapplethorpe’s photographs inside the glass box that houses the altar of Augustus. On paper the pairing jars, in the room it works: his polished black and white chases the same idea of the perfect body as the Roman relief.
8 July to 11 October 2026
A single painting, and that is precisely why it is worth the trip: the Woman in Blue is on loan from the Rijksmuseum, one of only thirty four Vermeers in existence.
12 June to 18 October 2026
More than three hundred objects on the Trojan myth as Rome’s founding story, many of them lent by Turkey. It sits inside the Colosseum, so it comes with a ticket to the most visited monument in Italy.
22 July to 18 October 2026
More than seventy objects from the storerooms of Herculaneum, rarely shown: tableware, furniture, tools and a loaf of bread carbonised by the eruption of AD 79. Not great art, but daily life stopped in a single afternoon.
10 July to 25 October 2026
The Galleria Nazionale restages the exhibition Karl Lagerfeld staged there in 1985 to mark twenty years of work with Fendi. An avowed remake, best read as an archive prised open again.
4 July to 15 November 2026
The least told chapter of Roman Egypt: the oases of the western desert between the first century BC and the fifth AD. Finds from the Museo Nazionale Romano, some recovered by the Carabinieri art squad, are set against video art and digital reconstructions.
11 June to 15 November 2026
The first Italian museum retrospective devoted to Miriam Cahn, curated by Cristiana Perrella: over 130 paintings, drawings and pastels on the body, vulnerability and the violence of war. Painting that stares back at you, and not a restful visit.
9 June to 13 December 2026
The widest survey of Mexican art seen in Europe in decades: over 140 works, with Frida Kahlo, Orozco and Siqueiros alongside Rivera. It is housed at Villa Caffarelli, so it pairs naturally with the Capitoline Museums.
Dates and prices change, and this page may not reflect the latest updates: before you travel, always check the museum’s own page, linked under each exhibition, which is the most reliable source.