A guide to the best exhibitions to visit in Italy in March

Two years after the monumental retrospective that the Fondation Louis Vuitton dedicated to the work of Mark Rothko, the American painter's works are coming to Italy with an exhibition at Palazzo Strozzi that promises to be unmissable. Curated by Christopher Rothko and Elena Geuna, the exhibition is conceived as a dialogue with the architecture of the palace and the city, highlighting the relationship between classical balance and expressive intensity that translates into a new perception of space through color in his works. The exhibition brings together over seventy works from private collections and international institutions such as MoMA and the Metropolitan Museum in New York, the Tate in London, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris. The exhibition project is not limited to the rooms of Palazzo Strozzi but also involves two other places dear to the artist: the Museum of San Marco, with works in dialogue with the frescoes by Beato Angelico, and the Vestibule of the Laurentian Library designed by Michelangelo.

More than a conventional retrospective, The House That Jack Built transforms the Navate of Pirelli HangarBicocca into a large participatory environment. The exhibition by New York-based Thai artist Rirkrit Tiravanija traces over thirty years of his architectural and spatial research, staging an articulated system of structures and installations that the public is invited to inhabit and activate. A central figure in relational art, Tiravanija conceives of the work as a shared experience: spaces for meeting, playing, resting, or cooking redefine the role of the viewer, who becomes an integral part of the work. Curated by Lucia Aspesi and Vicente Todolí, the exhibition brings together projects inspired by famous Modernist architecture, reinterpreted as platforms for use and interaction.

A dialogue between generations of photographers redefines the myth of the American West in The New American West: Photography in Conversation, a project hosted by Galleria 10 Corso Como in collaboration with MIA Photo Fair BNP Paribas as part of MIA OFF. Co-curated by Alessio de' Navasques, Howard Greenberg, and Carrie Scott, the exhibition explores how the American West has been constructed, mythologized, and transformed by the camera lens over the course of nearly a century. Contemporary images by Maryam Eisler and Alexei Riboud are juxtaposed with photographs by masters such as Edward Weston, Paul Strand, and Diane Arbus, tracing the idea of a multifaceted and evolving West. The project stems from a trip taken in 2024 by Eisler and Riboud through Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and Utah, where the two photographers confronted the same scenarios with different perspectives: Eisler's point of view is more cinematic and introspective, while Riboud's is more rigorous and contemplative.

Words as action, sound, presence: at MAMbo - Museo d'Arte Moderna di Bologna, a major retrospective pays tribute to John Giorno, a radical figure on the New York scene in the 1970s. John Giorno: The Performative Word, curated by Lorenzo Balbi, retraces his hybrid practice of poetry, visual arts, performance, and activism in the Sala delle Ciminiere, which also arose through collaborations with avant-garde figures such as Andy Warhol and Patti Smith. The centerpiece of the exhibition is Dial-A-Poem, a 1969 project that transformed the telephone into a means of participatory poetic dissemination, also presented at the Museum of Modern Art. For the occasion, an Italian version of the work, Dial-A-Poem Italy, has been created in collaboration with Giorno Poetry Systems and a new telephone number +390510304278.

In conjunction with the 2026 Art Biennale, the Ca’ Pesaro International Gallery of Modern Art is dedicating a major exhibition to Jenny Saville, one of the most important contemporary painters. The artist’s first major exhibition in Venice, the project traces her career from the 1990s to the present day through some thirty paintings, including some of her most important works. The monumental canvases dialogue with the city's pictorial tradition, particularly the Venetian school, highlighting Saville's deep connection with art history. Known for renewing contemporary figuration by exploring the body and its social implications, the artist also presents a new cycle created for Ca' Pesaro, a tribute to painting and Venice's long artistic heritage.

Palazzo Buontalenti hosts a major retrospective paying tribute to Ettore Sottsass, a key figure in 20th-century design and architecture. I am an architect. Ettore Sottsass revisits over thirty years of work, from the post-war period to the early 1970s, starting from the collection donated to the CSAC Centro Studi e Archivio della Comunicazione (Center for Communication Studies and Archives). The exhibition also explores his connection with Tuscany, from ceramics with Aldo Londi to collaborations with Poltronova. Drawings, photographs, objects, and archival materials, many of which have never been seen before, convey a critical view of the myth of progress, oriented towards a new humanism in design based on form, color, and light.

Seven centuries of images, symbols, and interpretations recounted in Tarot. Origins, Cards, Fortune, the major exhibition that the Accademia Carrara is dedicating to the history of tarot cards. Curated by Paolo Plebani, the exhibition offers a journey from the 15th century to the present day, reconstructing the commissions, techniques, and iconographic metamorphoses that transformed a refined aristocratic pastime into one of the most powerful symbolic tools of the modern age. The centerpiece of the project is the extraordinary recomposition of the Colleoni Deck, attributed to Bonifacio Bembo, brought together thanks to the collaboration with The Morgan Library & Museum. Alongside Renaissance masterpieces, works by artists such as Victor Brauner and Niki de Saint Phalle testify to the imaginative power of tarot cards, between esotericism, avant-garde, and contemporary visual culture.

Andrea Branzi by Toyo Ito. Continuous Present, a major monographic exhibition dedicated to Andrea Branzi, a key figure in Italian design, is the result of a dialogue between visions and generations. The project, carried out in collaboration with the Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain, takes shape through the eyes of Toyo Ito, a long-time friend and interlocutor of the Florentine designer. Installations, objects, drawings, and photographs construct a journey that retraces the central themes of his research and his connection with Triennale Milano, an institution where he served as designer, theorist, and curator between 1973 and 2022. A biographical section covers the radical periods of Archizoom Associati, Alchimia, and Memphis Group, up to his anthropological approach to design. The heart of the exhibition is a large installation dedicated to No Stop City (1969–1972), a critical manifesto of the modern metropolis.

Fifty years after the historic exhibition of 1975-76, Palazzo dei Diamanti pays tribute to Andy Warhol with a re-edition of Ladies and Gentlemen, a project that marked a decisive turning point in his work. Moving away from Hollywood icons such as Marilyn Monroe, Warhol chose African-American and Puerto Rican drag queens as his protagonists, bringing the themes of identity, gender, and representation to the forefront. Promoted by Fondazione Ferrara Arte with the support of the Andy Warhol Museum, the exhibition brings together over 150 works, including paintings, silkscreen prints, drawings, and Polaroids, accompanying the famous series with a selection of iconic portraits – from Mao Zedong to Mick Jagger – and intense self-portraits.

In the year Gibellina is Capital of Contemporary Art, the Pietro Consagra Theater is transformed into a space for artistic exchange before its completion, designed by Mario Cucinella and scheduled for fall 2026. Curated by Andrea Cusumano, the exhibition project brings Masbedo and Adrian Paci into dialogue within the Piranesian-inspired concrete structure. On the first level, on three large screens, The Bell Tolls Upon the Waves (2024) by the Albanian artist takes shape; on the upper floor, a single monumental projection hosts Resto (2021) by Masbedo. Both works reflect on the Mediterranean as a human and political space, at the intersection of sea, travel, and migration. Images and sounds thus construct an engaging experience that compares the poetics and visions of the two artists in relation to Consagra's legacy.

Deep seas of inattention inaugurates a new exhibition cycle that connects Paul Thorel's archive with the protagonists of contemporary digital research, through loans and activities curated by Sara Dolfi Agostini. The exhibition brings together key works by Thorel and works by Irish artist Yuri Pattison, constructing a landscape of sunrises and sunsets reflected on electronic seas and multiplied horizons. The title refers to the “profound inattention” generated by the technological noise of contemporary society, anticipated in the novel White Noise (1985) by American writer Don DeLillo. Between twilight horizons and digital landscapes, the works question the idea of linear progress and reflect on how technologies and data flows transform the contemporary perception of time, space, and reality.

Palazzo Esposizioni is hosting a major retrospective celebrating Mario Schifano, a central figure in Italian art in the second half of the 20th century and a leading figure on the Roman art scene. With over one hundred works from public and private collections, the exhibition reconstructs his entire creative career, from his early days marked by experimentation with materials to his works from the 1990s. The chronological layout highlights his most incisive visual inventions: from monochromes to images filtered through the language of photography, from television landscapes to the contamination between painting and cinema, to the cycles of more explicit civil commitment. The juxtaposition of works belonging to the same series highlights the vitality and continuous transformation of his pictorial language.

Museion is dedicating a major retrospective to Franco Vaccari, one of the most original voices in Italian conceptual art. Bringing together photographs, videos, artist's books, and archival materials, the exhibition offers for the first time a comprehensive reading of his environments, the focus of a body of work that questioned the idea of the artwork as a finished object. Trained as a physicist, Vaccari conceived his famous Real-Time Exhibitions as open devices in which the public is called upon to be an active part of the creative process. At the center is the idea of the “concealment of the author” and the role of technology in how reality is perceived, remembered, and shared. The thematic itinerary alternates between historical environments and participatory projects, including the famous action at the 1972 Biennale, highlighting the value of experience, the unexpected, and the collective trace as constituent elements of the work.