Eight art exhibitions in Italy not to miss — beyond the usual stops
This fall, travelers will find no shortage of remarkable art exhibitions in Italy 2025. From Milan to Palermo, museums across the country open their doors to shows that highlight both international names and hidden treasures. Some exhibitions take place in world-famous institutions, while others invite discovery in cities less visited by international audiences. Together, they offer authentic encounters with Italian creativity and reinforce that art remains a universal language, accessible beyond words.
This season’s highlights include a Giorgio Armani retrospective at Milan’s Pinacoteca di Brera, the full-scale reconstruction of Constantine’s statue in Rome, and the unveiling of Giuseppe Gricci’s terracotta Pietà in Naples. Contemporary voices and fresh perspectives emerge in Florence, Venice, Palermo, Turin, and Bologna—inviting travelers to look beyond the obvious and discover exhibitions they might not expect.
Here are eight must-see art exhibitions in Italy this fall.
Giorgio Armani. Milano, per amore – Pinacoteca di Brera (Milan)
The fall 2025 exhibition at the Pinacoteca di Brera is both a tribute and a dialogue. Giorgio Armani. Milano, per amore presents more than 120 creations from the ARMANI/Archive in conversation with masterpieces of Italian painting from the Middle Ages to the nineteenth century.
Armani’s own reflection, drawn from his autobiography Per amore, guides the show: “An exhibition can be seen in two ways. On the one hand, there is the immediate satisfaction of the creator’s ego. On the other hand, there is the didactic value, the unique testimony you can offer to the public, but above all to young creatives, through your work: a lasting and rewarding feeling.” This philosophy transforms the exhibition from a fashion retrospective into an artistic dialogue about legacy and cultural memory.
The garments on display highlight Armani’s signatures: a reinterpretation of tailoring, subtle decoration, neutral colors, and a measured creativity that reveals itself slowly. Visitors encounter contrasts of texture and tone, presented within Brera’s historic galleries.
Dates: Through January 11, 2026
Address: Pinacoteca di Brera, Via Brera 28, Milan
Website: pinacotecabrera.org
Instagram: @pinacotecabrera
Statua colossale di Costantino – Musei Capitolini, Villa Caffarelli (Rome)
At the Capitoline Museums, the garden of Villa Caffarelli now hosts a full-scale reconstruction of the Colossus of Constantine. The original statue, created in the fourth century CE, once stood about thirteen meters tall.
Only fragments survive today—head, hands, feet, knee, and shin—rediscovered in 1486 near the Basilica of Maxentius. They have long been displayed in the courtyard of Palazzo dei Conservatori, installed during Michelangelo’s redesign of the Capitoline Hill in the sixteenth century.
The reconstruction, realized with the Sovrintendenza Capitolina, Fondazione Prada, and Factum Foundation, combines archaeological study and 3D modeling. Scholars confirmed the figure was seated and made as an acrolith, with marble for exposed parts and gilded bronze or stucco for the drapery. Constantine was represented as Jupiter, holding a scepter and globe.
Dates: Through December 31, 2025
Address: Piazzale Caffarelli, 2, Rome
Website: museicapitolini.org
Instagram: @museiincomuneroma
Lorenzo Bonechi: La città delle donne – Museo Novecento (Florence)
Seventy years after his birth, Florence honors the Tuscan artist Lorenzo Bonechi with La città delle donne. The Museo Novecento presents 25 works in dialogue with its permanent collection, curated by Sergio Risaliti and Eva Francioli with the Lorenzo Bonechi Archive.
Bonechi emerged in the vibrant art scene of the 1980s, engaging with movements such as Anachronism and Pittura colta. Rooted in drawing, his practice evolved into painting that merged Byzantine, Russian, and early Renaissance influences. His art reflects both spiritual inquiry and a search for harmony between humanity and divinity.
The exhibition highlights Bonechi’s female figures—ethereal yet grounded—set against minimal landscapes and architectures. They embody both Christian and classical ideals, evoking images of saints as well as Greek Korai. Bonechi once wrote: “To understand the present, look into the past.” This exhibition affirms that vision, situating him as a distinctive voice of modern Italian art.
Dates: Through October 29, 2025
Address: Museo Novecento, Piazza di Santa Maria Novella 10, Florence
Website: museonovecento.it
Instagram: @museonovecento
Lucio Fontana: Manu-Facture – Peggy Guggenheim Collection (Venice)
This exhibition at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection is the first devoted exclusively to Lucio Fontana’s ceramics. While most visitors know him for the slashed canvases of the 1950s and 1960s, Manu-Facture: The Ceramics of Lucio Fontana reveals a different side of his practice.
The show presents more than seventy works, including several never previously exhibited, tracing Fontana’s engagement with clay from his beginnings in Argentina in the 1920s through his long career in Italy. The installation highlights how he used clay as a site for experimentation, responding to political change and collaborating with artisans like Tullio d’Albisola and the Mazzotti workshop in Albisola.
Clay allowed Fontana to work informally and intimately, engaging both its physicality and expressive potential. The exhibition situates these objects within a broader view of his art, encouraging visitors to see beyond the iconic canvases.
Dates: Through March 2, 2026
Address: Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Dorsoduro 701, Venice
Website: guggenheim-venice.it
Instagram: @guggenheim_venice
Giusi Sferruggia: Macchia Mediterranea – Museo Riso (Palermo)
Palermo’s Palazzo Belmonte Riso presents Macchia Mediterranea, a site-specific installation by Giusi Sferruggia, on view October 4–14, 2025. Curated by Marcello Carriero, the project is part of preview events for Palermo’s iDesign week, scheduled for 2026.
Sferruggia, a Palermo-born artist, draws inspiration from Sicily’s Mediterranean landscape. Her work suggests both the richness and fragility of this environment. Through a fluid, gouache-like technique, she evokes the brilliance of surface reflections alongside the shadows of the sea’s depths.
The installation highlights her broader practice, which spans performance, installation, and photography, while remaining deeply rooted in painting. With a focus on the body, material, and existence, Sferruggia creates works that pulse with life and extend into space.
Dates: October 4–14, 2025
Address: Museo Riso, Via Vittorio Emanuele 365, Palermo
Website: museoartecontemporanea.it
Elisabetta Di Maggio: Frangible – GAM (Turin)
The Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea (GAM) in Turin dedicates a major exhibition to Elisabetta Di Maggio from October 29, 2025, through March 1, 2026. Curated by Chiara Bertola and Fabio Cafagna, the exhibition spans six rooms on the museum’s first floor, tracing the artist’s career through both historical works and new creations made for GAM.
Cutting is the central act of Di Maggio’s practice. It is both a gesture of care and one of irreversibility, a way of engaging materials with precision and intensity. Visitors encounter works ranging from incised tissue-paper walls to soaps sculpted as urban maps, mosaics of wax and glass, porcelain, botanical fragments, and mandalas made of postage stamps.
The exhibition begins with Annunciazione (2025), two dragonfly wings in oxidized copper, and ends with Desiderale (2006), a video transforming incisions into a starry sky. Themes of mapping, cosmic and botanical patterns, memory, and the sacredness of nature shape this sensory journey.
Dates: October 29, 2025 – March 1, 2026
Address: GAM Torino, Via Magenta 31, Turin
Website: gamtorino.it
Instagram: @gamtorino
La Pietà di Gricci – Museo e Real Bosco di Capodimonte (Naples)
A significant chapter in Capodimonte’s identity has returned to Naples with the acquisition of Giuseppe Gricci’s Pietà. This rare terracotta, created around 1744–1745, had circulated on the international art market before being identified by scholars nearly twenty years ago.
Eike Schmidt, director of the Museo e Real Bosco di Capodimonte, called it “moving to bring back to Naples such an important piece of the history of the Royal Porcelain Factory.” Gricci, a Florentine sculptor and chief modeler for the factory founded by Charles of Bourbon in 1743, played a crucial role in shaping the court’s sacred imagery.
The exhibition, on view through October 28, 2025, presents the terracotta in dialogue with Gricci’s porcelain Pietà with Saint John the Evangelist from the Museo Duca di Martina. Both compositions echo Michelangelo’s pyramidal structure of the Pietà. Yet their moods diverge: porcelain conveys theatrical distance, while terracotta offers intimate humanity. The Virgin’s gesture of wiping her tears in the terracotta reveals maternal suffering with moving immediacy.
Dates: Through October 28, 2025
Address: Museo e Real Bosco di Capodimonte, Via Miano 2, Naples
Website: capodimonte.cultura.gov.it
Instagram: @museoboscocapodimonte
The Discreet Charm of Drawing – Pinacoteca Nazionale (Bologna)
Bologna’s Pinacoteca Nazionale offers visitors an exhibition that highlights the power of drawing as both process and art form. The Discreet Charm of Drawing presents a selection from the recent donation of 179 drawings and 21 prints by scholar and collector Alessandro Zacchi. About sixty works are on view, spanning the fifteenth to the twentieth century, and organized into themes such as composition, figures, landscapes, and portraits.
The drawings include preparatory studies by artists of the Bolognese school, along with works by Ludovico Carracci, Donato Creti, and Giovanni Boldini. Some attributions remain uncertain, inviting fresh research and interpretation. The exhibition reflects Bologna’s long tradition of scholarship, rooted in a city that is also home to the University of Bologna, the world’s oldest university founded in 1088.
For travelers seeking an authentic, off-the-beaten-path cultural experience, this exhibition reveals Bologna as a city where knowledge and creativity continue to converge.
Address: Pinacoteca Nazionale di Bologna, Via Belle Arti 56, Bologna
Website: pinacotecabologna.beniculturali.it
Instagram: @pinacoteca_bologna
Embark on a Cultural Discover
Italy’s museums this fall present a season of cultural discovery. Together, these eight art exhibitions in Italy 2025 offer a wide lens—from Armani’s enduring elegance in Milan to rediscovered treasures in Naples, from contemporary dialogues in Palermo and Turin to scholarly insights in Bologna.
For travelers, these shows invite authentic encounters with Italian creativity, beyond the typical itinerary. Whether drawn to fashion, ancient sculpture, or the fragile intimacy of drawing, visitors will find exhibitions that resonate long after they leave the gallery.
