ROME.- Rome has been written about, painted, photographed, mapped, idealized, and mythologized for centuries. But how does the Eternal City truly compare to today’s global capitals—and what emerges when familiar narratives are set aside? These questions are at the heart of Rome in the World, the major exhibition that opened on December 17, 2025 at MAXXI – the National Museum of 21st Century Arts, where it will remain on view through April 6, 2026.
Curated by urbanist and scholar Ricky Burdett, the exhibition places Rome in direct conversation with other major world cities, from Paris and London to Beijing, Lagos, and São Paulo. Rather than positioning Rome as an untouchable historical monument or unquestioned Caput Mundi, Rome in the World deliberately shifts perspective, presenting the city as a living, evolving metropolis shaped by many of the same forces confronting global urban centers today.
At its core, the exhibition asks deceptively simple questions: Is Rome congested or livable? Fragmented or socially cohesive? Expansive or compact? And perhaps most importantly, what role does Rome occupy today in the global imagination?
To explore these questions, the exhibition unfolds through two complementary lenses. The first is analytical and data-driven. Visitors encounter an extensive array of statistics, indicators, and visualizations addressing key urban dynamics such as space, mobility, environment, and society. Population density, transportation flows, green space distribution, aging demographics, income levels, and exposure to climate-related risks are rendered legible through a sophisticated exhibition design.
The second lens is cultural and symbolic. Alongside diagrams and datasets, Rome in the World examines the powerful imagery that has shaped perceptions of the city for centuries. From the Grand Tour to mass tourism, from poetic idealization to critical observation, Rome has long existed as much in the imagination as in physical space. Artworks, photographs, texts, and archival materials trace how generations of artists, writers, and thinkers have interpreted and inhabited the city.
The result is a layered contemporary portrait of Rome as it confronts global challenges including climate change, migration, demographic transformation, and sustainability—while still bearing the weight of its extraordinary past. Rather than offering a single narrative, the exhibition presents Rome as a mosaic of contradictions, tensions, and continuities.
One of the exhibition’s most striking features is a monumental physical model of the entire Municipality of Rome. Commissioned by MAXXI and composed of 953 terracotta tiles at a scale of 1:7,500, it stands as the largest model of Rome ever produced. This sculptural landscape serves as a dynamic platform onto which data projections reveal patterns of density, infrastructure, environmental vulnerability, and access to services across the city.
Photography plays a central role throughout the exhibition. Works by internationally acclaimed photographers including Iwan Baan, Olivo Barbieri, Martin Roemers, Francesco Jodice, Giovanna Silva, Armin Linke, and Peter Bialobrzeski offer comparative views of cities worldwide, allowing visitors to trace visual parallels and contrasts between Rome and other global metropolises.
A newly commissioned photographic series by Marina Caneve, now part of the MAXXI Collection, returns the focus to Rome itself. Rather than presenting postcard images, Caneve documents the city’s overlooked and peripheral spaces—revealing moments where nature, infrastructure, and daily life intersect in unexpected ways. Her work exposes a Rome that operates quietly behind the scenes, beyond monumentality.
The exhibition is organized into three main sections. Global Comparisons situates Rome alongside seventeen major cities, examining how space, mobility, environment, and society function across different urban contexts. Rome in the World’s Imagination, curated by Paola Viganò with Maria Medushevskaya, explores literary, artistic, and photographic interpretations of the city, from Lord Byron and Stendhal to contemporary voices. The final section, The DNA of Rome, focuses on the present, addressing who lives in Rome today, where they live, and how social and environmental vulnerabilities are distributed across the city.
For MAXXI, Rome in the World functions as both a research project and a public forum. Foundation President Maria Emanuela Bruni has described the exhibition as an invitation to rethink Rome’s place among world capitals during the Jubilee year, while Artistic Director Francesco Stocchi has emphasized the museum’s role as a platform for critical reflection on contemporary urban transformation. Architecture and Design Director Lorenza Baroncelli has highlighted the exhibition’s urban-planning lens as a way to view Rome “from the outside” before uncovering its inner structure.
For curator Ricky Burdett, the project set out to overturn traditional viewpoints and present Rome as a complex contemporary urban artifact—socially stratified, environmentally rich, and historically layered. “The data,” he has noted, “offer a new reading of Rome not as an exception, but as part of a global condition.”
Accompanied by an extensive public program of talks and debates, as well as a bilingual Italian–English catalogue published by Corraini, Rome in the World does not aim to deliver definitive answers. Instead, it invites visitors to reflect on what Rome is today—and how cities like it may shape the future of global urban life.
