MACRO – Rome Museum of Contemporary Art

The MACRO - Rome Museum of Contemporary Art has its main entrance at Via Nizza 138, 00198 Roma, inside the block bounded by Via Nizza, Via Reggio Emilia and Via Cagliari, on the border between the Salario and Nomentano neighborhoods, a few minutes' walk from Porta Pia and Piazza Fiume. The hours are these: Tuesday to Friday from 12:00 to 19:00, Saturday and Sunday from 10:00 to 19:00, closed Monday, with last entry 30 minutes before closing. The full ticket costs €6, the reduced €4. The cinema hall has a separate admission ticket, €7 full and €5 reduced. The reduced rate applies to those aged 7 to 26, to those over 65, to teachers in service, to law enforcement, to journalists with a press card, to students and doctoral students and to groups of 10 or more people. Admission is free for children under 6, people with disabilities with their companion, licensed tour guides, ICOM members and one chaperone for every 10 students. Booking is not required: you buy at the desk or online on the CoopCulture circuit. Phone +39 06 696271, email info.macro@palaexpo.it, official website museomacro.it. The coat check is active during all opening hours and the museum lends wheelchairs free of charge. Guided visits by reservation cost €100 per group and €80 for school groups. Children's workshops range from €8 to €12. Prices and calendar may change with the opening of each new exhibition cycle: before leaving it is always worth opening the official website.

Anyone who wants to place the visit within a wider itinerary will find the complete list of the capital's civic and state venues among the museums of Rome, with addresses, hours and prices.

What the MACRO - Rome Museum of Contemporary Art really is

The MACRO is the contemporary art museum of the Municipality of Rome. It's not state-run, not private, not a foundation: it's a civic institution, that is, a museum that belongs to the city and that the city pays for. This origin explains almost everything odd that has happened to it over the last 20 years, including the three different identities it has worn from 2018 to today. A state museum has a technical direction and a set of rules that move slowly. A municipal museum, in Italy, instead breathes at the rhythm of the politics that governs it: the city administration changes, the model changes, even the name on the facade changes.

The current legal structure is this: ownership belongs to Roma Capitale, management has been entrusted since January 2018 to the Azienda Speciale Palaexpo, the Municipality's instrumental body that also runs the Palazzo Esposizioni and the RIF Museo delle Periferie. Until 2017 the MACRO was part of the Musei in Comune circuit of the Sovrintendenza Capitolina ai Beni Culturali, and that handover is not a bureaucratic detail: it is the reason why the MACRO ticket today doesn't work like the one for the Capitoline Museums, the MIC Card isn't valid there and the first Sunday of the month doesn't bring free admission. Anyone who arrives assuming the opposite ends up at the door arguing with the ticket desk.

From the visitor's point of view, the MACRO today is a museum of exhibitions more than a museum of a collection. It has a considerable permanent collection, which we'll see in detail further on, but shows it only in stretches. The bulk of the programming runs in cycles, with several exhibitions opening on the same day and closing at different times, and with a schedule that places cinema, music, performance, photography, book presentations and workshops alongside visual art. Artistic direction has been entrusted since March 26, 2025 to Cristiana Perrella, appointed with a three-year mandate. The museum, closed for works during the handover phase, reopened to the public on December 11, 2025 with a new arrangement of the spaces.

The MACRO is the Roman museum that pays off most for those who return and disappoints most those who go once hoping to find the "masterpieces". It is not a collection to tick off. It is a permanent work site, and it should be visited the way you read a weekly magazine, knowing that next week's issue will be different.

Where the MACRO is and how to get there

The museum occupies an entire block of the Salario, one of the neighborhoods laid out after 1870 in the Rome that was growing northeast of the Aurelian Walls. We are outside the historic city but not in the periphery: from Via Nizza to Porta Pia it's a 10-minute walk, to Piazza Fiume five, to Villa Torlonia a good quarter of an hour. It's an area of Umbertine and early-20th-century apartment buildings, with neighborhood shops, banks, offices and very few tourists, and its atmosphere changes radically between a weekday and a Sunday afternoon.

By public transport to the MACRO

The closest subway stations are Policlinico and Castro Pretorio, both on Line B. From either one it's a 10 to 15 minute walk, flat, on wide sidewalks. The surface hub to use is Piazza Fiume, which is one of the best-served bus junctions in the northeastern part of the city, along with the lines that run on Via Nomentana and Corso d'Italia below Porta Pia. Line numbers get reshuffled fairly often, so set your stop in the transit company's app on the day of your visit instead of trusting a list printed somewhere else.

A warning: don't get dropped off at Porta Pia thinking you can see the museum from there. You can't. Via Nizza is an inner residential street, MACRO faces it with a long, low front, and Odile Decq's entrance, all glass and metal, only stands out when you're almost in front of it.

By car, by bike and on foot

The area is inside the paid parking zone, with blue lines on almost every street of the block, and during office hours finding a spot on Via Nizza or Via Reggio Emilia takes patience. The museum has reserved spaces for visitors with disabilities. Getting there by bike is easy: the slopes are minimal and the neighborhood has a regular street grid, the checkerboard kind typical of post-unification building, which makes the route easy to read even for people who don't know Rome.

On foot, MACRO fits naturally into two itineraries. The first goes down toward the center through Porta Pia, Corso d'Italia and Via Veneto, and in half an hour takes you to Piazza Barberini. The second goes up Via Nomentana toward Villa Torlonia and, a bit further on, toward the Coppedè district. These are walks to take slowly, preferably in the morning.

MACRO hours, tickets and costs

How much it costs to get into MACRO

Six euros for a full ticket, four for reduced. It's a low price for a museum of this size, and it needs to be said clearly because MACRO had free admission for years. The ticket came back with the reopening in December 2025, after a free period that covered the first two weeks of operation. People who remember the years without a ticket desk may turn up their nose. But the math is different: six euros for three or four serious exhibitions, in a city where a single temporary exhibition in a palazzo in the center asks for 15 or 16, is still a bargain.

Discounts and free admission

The 4 euro reduced ticket covers a wide group: ages 7 to 26, people over 65, teachers in service, members of law enforcement, journalists with press cards, students and doctoral students, and groups of at least 10 people, as well as people covered by institutional agreements. Admission is free for children up to 6 years old, for people with disabilities and their companion, for licensed tour guides, for ICOM card holders and for one companion for every 10 students on a school visit. Opening events have free admission, and it's the best way to understand in a single evening what kind of crowd frequents this place.

The cinema, guided tours and workshops

MACRO's cinema hall has its own ticket office: 7 euros full, 5 reduced. It surprises people who walk in expecting a small service room, because it's actually an independent program, with series built around urban themes and the city. Guided tours by reservation cost 100 euros per group, 80 euros for schools. Workshops for the little ones cost between 8 and 12 euros per participant. To organize, it's best to write to the museum's address during reply hours, Monday to Friday between 09:30 and 17:00.

The former Peroni brewery: the factory that became MACRO

Before it was a museum, this block made beer. On November 24, 1911, Birra Peroni bought the area between Via Reggio Emilia, Via Nizza and Via Cagliari. From the following year, 1912, the construction of the plant's buildings was overseen by Gustavo Giovannoni, one of the most influential architects and theorists of early 20th century Rome, the man who would formulate the concept of "thinning out" (diradamento) applied to historic centers and who would teach for decades at the Faculty of Architecture. The fact that a beer factory was signed by Giovannoni says a lot about how, in those years, industrial architecture was considered a noble subject.

The plant worked until 1971, when production stopped. It followed the fate of so many urban factories left inside a city that had grown up around them in the meantime: a decade of proposals, negotiations and projects. Between 1978 and 1982 a redevelopment plan was agreed with the city, and in 1984 the city administration took over the complex, assigning it to the Municipal Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art. Real work only began in 1996 and ended in 1999, the year the renovated block was opened as the new home of Rome's Municipal Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art, on a surface of around 3,800 square meters.

What is left of the factory inside the museum

Much more than you'd think. The long bays, the pillars, the generous heights of the ground floor rooms are those of the production sheds. The tall, narrow windows facing Via Reggio Emilia belong to the industrial language of the early 1900s, with that Liberty taste applied with restraint that you find in very few other buildings of this kind in Rome. Walking through the historic rooms you sense the difference in rhythm from the new block: here the space is measured, regular, almost monastic. Over there it's fluid and oblique.

Anyone interested in this industrial history can complete it on the other side of the neighborhood, where the Archivio Storico e Museo Birra Peroni is located, which keeps documents, posters and machinery of the company. It's a visit most Romans ignore and that is worth an afternoon.

Odile Decq's expansion: the new MACRO (2001-2010)

In 2000 the City of Rome announced an international competition for the expansion of the museum. Odile Decq won it in 2001, a French architect from Laval, trained in Rennes and Paris, at the time one of the few women heading a firm of that level and already known for the Banque Populaire de l'Ouest headquarters in Rennes. The construction site opened on July 29, 2004 and closed in May 2010. The expanded museum reopened to the public on December 5, 2010. With the expansion the total surface rose to about 13,000 square meters, of which about 10,000 were new work.

Decq's project is one of the very few contemporary buildings in Rome that you can talk about with a group without having to justify anything. It works. It isn't a neutral container and it isn't a self-referential sculptural gesture either: it's a machine of routes, built on the idea that in a contemporary art museum the movement of the public is part of the exhibition.

The black hall and the suspended red core

You enter from Via Nizza through a glass facade that lets you glimpse from outside what's happening inside. The hall is kept in grays and blacks, with glossy surfaces that multiply the reflections, and from there emerges the piece everyone remembers: the red volume of the auditorium, a suspended, curved body that crosses the space in midair. The red isn't a color whim. Decq works with color codes, and the assignment is strict: black and gray for circulation spaces, red for places of speech and socializing, white for exhibition rooms. Visitors understand where they are before even reading a sign.

MACRO's suspended walkways

The walkways wind around that core. They are metal routes at different heights that connect the levels, turn over the hall, look out over the void and now and then widen into small exhibition spaces. Decq spoke of dynamic balance, of surfaces sliding over one another. For those walking on them, though, what comes to mind is Piranesi and his Carceri, an architecture of bridges that intersect with no privileged point of view. A skylight brings natural light from above and completely changes the character of the space depending on the hour and the season.

A tip worth more than many explanations: walk the walkways twice, once going up and once going down. They are designed so that the same stretch gives two different images in the two directions of travel, and most visitors only notice if someone tells them.

MACRO's terrace and water basin

On top of the museum Decq built a piazza. The roof, about 2,500 square meters, is a walkable urban garden, reached by ramps that climb from Via Nizza front and from Via Reggio Emilia side, conceived as public space and not as something reserved for ticket holders. The surface alternates different materials, sand, gravel, limestone, grasses, and a blade of water that on still days becomes a mirror for the sky of the Salario district. There are a bar and a restaurant on the same level, and the terrace hosts events, concerts and performances in the warm season.

It has to be said honestly that this is also the point where the project has suffered most from the passing of the years and of managements: a roof of that kind needs constant maintenance, and its usability has changed quite a few times depending on the moment and the programming. Check on site if it's open on the day you go.

The auditorium and the white rooms

The exhibition rooms of the new block are deliberately neutral: white walls, controlled light, very few fixed elements. Decq conceived them so that a work can be hung, suspended, placed on the floor or installed without the architecture imposing a direction on it. It's a much harder choice than it seems, because it gives up putting on a show exactly where the public would expect one. The auditorium, housed in the red volume, is the place for meetings, screenings and presentations, and has acoustics designed for the spoken word more than for symphonic music.

MACRO's seasons: names, directions, changes of course

Few Italian museums have changed their skin the way this one has. To understand it you have to start from far back, because the story of the container and that of the collection run on two separate tracks that only meet at the end.

From the Municipal Gallery to MACRO

The civic collection of modern and contemporary art began in the 19th century, when the City of Rome started buying works at the big exhibitions. The initial core goes back to purchases made in 1883 at the International Exhibition of Fine Arts, with the declared intention of building a city gallery. In 1913 Auguste Rodin donated to the city the bronze Bust of a Lady. In 1925, after other acquisitions, the administration decided to give the collection a permanent home at Palazzo Caffarelli, on the Capitoline Hill, and in 1931 the collection was further expanded. In 1938 the institution was abolished and the works passed to the National Gallery of Modern Art.

In 1949 the collection was reconstituted and many of the works deposited at the National Gallery returned to the Municipal Gallery, which reopened to the public at Palazzo Braschi. In 1963 a large part of the collection was moved to the Palazzo delle Esposizioni, where it stayed until 1981, the year the building closed for restoration. The works then went back into storage at Palazzo Braschi. Between 1991 and 1994 the collection, partly scattered, was reorganized and brought together, and in 1995 the Gallery reopened temporarily in the former Carmelite convent, showing 150 works. It's a story of moves that explains, better than any comment, why 20th century art took so long to find a home in Rome.

The first pavilion of the former Peroni plant opened to the public in 1997 and in 1999 the first two bodies assigned to the Gallery were completed. On October 11, 2002 the museum was officially inaugurated with the name it still carries, MACRO, Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome, under the direction of Danilo Eccher. Anyone who wants to see what became of the 19th and early 20th century part of the civic collection should go to the Galleria d'Arte Moderna di Roma, on Via Francesco Crispi, behind Via Veneto: it's MACRO's older sister and very few people visit it.

MACRO Testaccio and MACRO Future

In that same year, 2002, the museum opened a branch in two pavilions of the former Testaccio slaughterhouse, under the name MACRO Future, later known to everyone as MACRO Testaccio. It was a happy operation: two enormous industrial naves, the travertine and iron of Gioacchino Ersoch's 19th century architecture, the closeness to Monte dei Cocci and the Pyramid, and a young crowd that was coming to Testaccio anyway. For years those pavilions hosted the most physical and largest exhibitions that Via Nizza couldn't hold, besides the permanent presence, inside the complex, of the Academy of Fine Arts and the Roma Tre Faculty of Architecture.

That season is over. The complex in Piazza Orazio Giustiniani is no longer called MACRO Testaccio: it's the Mattatoio di Roma, a hub for research and artistic production with its own identity, run by Azienda Speciale Palaexpo until 2025 and then entrusted to the new Fondazione Mattatoio di Roma - Città delle arti. Anyone searching for "MACRO Testaccio" today finds a name that survives only in street directions and in the memory of Romans. If you pass by, Monte dei Cocci is 200 meters away and deserves the detour anyway.

MACRO Asilo, the Giorgio de Finis season (2018-2020)

In 2018, with the management passing to Azienda Speciale Palaexpo, the museum radically changed its formula. The direction was given to Giorgio de Finis, an anthropologist and filmmaker, who had already created MAAM, the museum born inside an occupied factory on Via Prenestina. The project was called MACRO Asilo and proposed an extreme idea: the welcoming museum, open to artists of every kind, where anyone could ask for a space and a time to show their work, in open polemic with the official art system and its hierarchies.

The result was the most visited and most discussed museum in the city. Admissions grew visibly, the rooms were full of people who had never set foot in a contemporary art museum, the programming was torrential and deliberately ungovernable. Militant critics treated it with condescension. Part of the Roman public remembers it instead as the period when MACRO had become a piazza. The truth is that both readings are right: MACRO Asilo brought in an audience that no other formula had ever reached, and at the same time made it almost impossible to tell serious work from noise. The experience ended in 2020.

Luca Lo Pinto's Museum for Preventive Imagination (2020-2024)

MACRO Asilo was followed by the exact reversal. In 2020 the artistic direction passed to Luca Lo Pinto, a Roman curator with long international experience, who renamed the museum Museo per l'Immaginazione Preventiva, a formula borrowed from the vocabulary of the avant-gardes and used to indicate an institution that imagines before it documents. Lo Pinto thought of the museum as a magazine: recurring sections, columns, periodic issues, a recognizable graphic identity and a program built by issues rather than by single exhibitions.

They were four years of real research, with a curatorial level that put MACRO back into international conversations and with admission that stayed free, a choice that consolidated a very young and very loyal audience. The mandate ended on December 31, 2024. The last exhibition of his tenure, Post Scriptum. Un museo dimenticato a memoria by Charlemagne Palestine, closed on February 16, 2025. Of the three recent seasons this is the most convincing in terms of content, with one reservation: anyone who wasn't already familiar with contemporary art struggled to get into that program.

Cristiana Perrella's direction and today's MACRO

After a few months of waiting and a selection with several candidates, on March 26, 2025 Cristiana Perrella was named director, a curator with a long career between Rome and Prato, with a three year mandate. Her approach is declaredly systemic: building a stable relationship with the city, enhancing the permanent collection with an educational path, working on the physical and emotional accessibility of the spaces, opening the museum's library to the public and keeping different disciplines and generations together.

The museum reopened on December 11, 2025 with three projects: UNAROMA, curated by Perrella herself with Luca Lo Pinto and organized in three sections, Set, Live and Off, with around 40 artists. Dissonanze, dedicated to the 25 years of the electronic music festival. And Abitare le rovine del presente by the Stalker group, a mapping of Roman urban regeneration. That reopening also brought the cinema hall with a program about the city, the restaurant on the top floor, the bar on the mezzanine, the library room and the study room, and a bookshop cafe. The ticket, as mentioned, is back.

The official name today is simply MACRO, Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome. The two names of past years, MACRO Asilo and Museo per l'Immaginazione Preventiva, belong to the history of the institution and not to its current signage.

MACRO's Capitoline collection of contemporary art

MACRO holds one of the largest public collections of Italian art from the second half of the 20th century in the country: about 600 works, formed mostly of acquisitions, prizes and donations accumulated over the whole last century. It's a collection that tells the story of Rome as an art capital in a phase when the city truly was one, between the 1950s and the 1970s.

The artists in MACRO's collection

The first core is that of postwar Roman abstraction and the Forma 1 group, founded in 1947: Carla Accardi, Antonio Sanfilippo, Achille Perilli, Piero Dorazio, joined by the ceramic sculptor Leoncillo Leonardi and Ettore Colla, who in the 1950s assembled sculptures from industrial scrap iron before the term arte povera existed. Anyone looking at an Accardi from the 1960s, with those white marks on a dark ground that look like an alphabet never deciphered, has in front of them one of the highest moments of European abstraction of the period.

The second core is Arte Povera, with Mario Ceroli and his figures cut out of raw wood and Pino Pascali, who died in a motorcycle accident in 1968 at the age of 32, author of fake cannons and fake animals that changed the Italian idea of sculpture. The third is the Scuola di Piazza del Popolo, the generation that in Rome crossed American pop art with local iconography: Tano Festa, Mario Schifano, Titina Maselli, Mimmo Rotella with his torn posters.

Alongside the masters, the collection includes a substantial body of artists from later generations, many of them Roman or active in Rome: Giovanni Albanese, Andrea Aquilanti, Gianni Asdrubali, Domenico Bianchi, Bruno Ceccobelli, Sarah Ciracì, Enzo Cucchi, Fabrice de Nola, Gianni Dessì, Daniele Galliano, Federico Guida, Felice Levini, Fabio Mauri, Luigi Ontani, Cristiano Pintaldi, Piero Pizzi Cannella, Gioacchino Pontrelli, Bernardo Siciliano, Sissi, Marco Tirelli. Some of these names, like Fabio Mauri with his screens and his projections on the body, or Luigi Ontani with his photographic tableaux vivants, are figures of international standing that the general Italian public still knows little.

Why MACRO's collection is rarely on view

Practically everyone asks me this, and it's a fair question. There are three reasons and they're worth stating without hypocrisy. The first is space: 600 works don't fit in the available rooms if at the same time you want to host four or five temporary exhibitions, and MACRO has built its identity on temporary programming. The second is conservation: many works of the second half of the 20th century are fragile, made of unstable materials, and rotation is a technical necessity before it's a curatorial choice. The third is historical, and concerns the moves mentioned earlier: a collection taken apart and put back together four times in 50 years reaches the present with problems of inventory, attribution and state of conservation that get solved slowly.

The current direction has put the enhancement of the permanent collection among its declared goals, with the idea of a dedicated educational path. It's the thing I'm waiting for with the most curiosity, because a civic museum that doesn't show its own collection betrays half of its reason for being. In the meantime, if you're looking for works from those same years on stable display, the Galleria Nazionale in Valle Giulia and the Museo Carlo Bilotti at the Aranciera of Villa Borghese offer a more immediate answer.

The exhibitions on at MACRO in 2026

The programming runs in cycles: several exhibitions open together and close on different dates, so the museum changes face without ever going completely dark. With a single 6 euro ticket you enter all those open that day, and that's why it's always worth checking the calendar before choosing your date. The cycle currently running includes six projects.

Miriam Cahn. What Looks at Me

Open from June 11 to November 15, 2026, curated by Cristiana Perrella, it's the most important exhibition of the cycle. Miriam Cahn, born in Basel in 1949, is one of the most radical voices in contemporary European painting: frontal figures, acid colors, bodies that look at the viewer instead of letting themselves be looked at, and a political practice that has cost her censorship and controversy in half of Europe. It's not an easy exhibition and it's not an exhibition for everyone, but it's exactly the kind of operation that justifies the existence of a civic contemporary art museum. The page dedicated to Miriam Cahn at MACRO collects hours and details.

Hito Steyerl. Mechanical Kurds

From April 29 to November 1, 2026, curated by Alice Labor. Hito Steyerl, a German artist and theorist born in Munich in 1966, works on the digital image, the data economy and the invisible labor that powers the technologies we all use every day. Her video installations are among the few around that manage to be both rigorous and funny. If you have only an hour and want to take home something that stays with you, go here. You'll find the details on the page for Hito Steyerl at MACRO.

One, Five, 12. 80 Years of the Strega Prize

From April 29 to September 20, 2026, curated by Maria Luisa Frisa and Mario Lupano. An exhibition on the 80th anniversary of the best-known Italian literary prize, built by two curators who come from fashion studies and visual culture, which means the subject is not literature in the abstract, but the way the prize has built an imaginary, rituals and public figures. For book lovers it's a required visit. The page for Uno, cinque, dodici at MACRO has the program.

Amelia Rosselli, a Song in Her Space

From April 29 to September 20, 2026, curated by Andrea Cortellessa. Amelia Rosselli, born in Paris in 1930 and died in Rome in 1996, daughter of Carlo Rosselli, who was murdered by the Fascists, was one of the most original poets of 20th century Italy and also a musician and scholar of music theory. Cortellessa is her most attentive reader. A poetry exhibition in a contemporary art museum can seem a gamble. Here it works, because the sound and visual material is treated as a work and not as illustration. See the page on Amelia Rosselli at MACRO.

Paul Thorel Prize, third edition

From June 11 to August 30, 2026. The prize is dedicated to the memory of Paul Thorel, an artist who worked on the digital image before photography became a matter of algorithms, and each edition puts the work of the finalists on show. It's the most useful project for understanding what artists under 40 are producing in Italy today. The file is on the page for Le imperfezioni, Premio Paul Thorel al MACRO.

SHE DEVIL 14

From April 29 to September 20, 2026. The women's video art series reaches its 14th edition: an international selection of short works, screened in sequence, that you watch seated and take in a little over an hour. It's the format I recommend to anyone bringing teenagers, because the length of the individual pieces holds attention without effort.

MACRO and the FotoGrafia festival

There's a chapter that Romans remember well and younger people haven't lived through. From 2010, first at the Testaccio site and from 2013 at the one on Via Nizza, MACRO was the main exhibition space of FotoGrafia. Festival Internazionale di Roma, hosting its major exhibitions, the group show on the theme of the year, the Commissione Roma and the Photobook Market. The Commissione Roma, in particular, was a smart formula: every year an internationally recognized photographer was invited to produce new work on the city, and the result then entered the public collections. It produced a visual archive of contemporary Rome that no institutional campaign would ever have produced with the same quality. Photography remains one of this museum's home subjects, and anyone who returns regularly almost always finds it on the program in one form or another.

How to visit MACRO: route, duration, tips

MACRO has no required route. You enter from Via Nizza, get your ticket, leave your backpack at the coat check and from there you start from whatever level you prefer. The practical suggestion is to go straight up to the walkways, look at the building from above and only then go down into the rooms. Understanding the machine before looking at the works helps a lot, because in this museum orientation is the main difficulty for first-time visitors.

How much time you need to visit MACRO

With a full cycle of four or five exhibitions, an hour and a half is the minimum and two and a half hours is about right. If you add a screening in the cinema hall, count on half a day. Anyone who comes in only for the architecture, without stopping at the works, gets through it in 40 minutes, but that's a way to waste six euros. The video installations, which are almost always present at MACRO, take a time that people tend not to factor in: a 20 minute piece should be watched for 20 minutes, otherwise you may as well skip it.

Can you take photos inside the rooms

In contemporary art exhibitions the rule changes from project to project, because it depends on the rights granted by the artists and the lenders. In general, photography without flash and without a tripod for personal use is allowed in the common spaces and in the rooms, while individual works may be marked as not to be photographed with a sign on the floor. The practical criterion is simple: look at the sign at the entrance of the room and, if in doubt, ask the room staff, who answer gladly.

MACRO with children

It works better than you'd expect. Children under six get in free, from seven up they pay four euros, and the museum organizes dedicated workshops at 8 to 12 euros. Contemporary art, contrary to the prejudice, is the most accessible for small children, because it doesn't require knowing mythology, sacred history or iconography: it asks you to look and react. The walkways are an attraction in themselves. The only precaution is length: with children under 10 don't go over an hour and a quarter, and pick Saturday or Sunday morning, when the museum opens at 10:00 and the rooms are still empty.

MACRO accessibility

The building was born accessible and this, in a city like Rome, needs to be said out loud. Accessible entrance, wheelchair-friendly routes, equipped restrooms, reserved parking spaces and free loan of wheelchairs. The ramps of Decq's expansion replace steps in several places, and the levels are connected by elevators. The theme the current direction has declared it wants to work on is cognitive and emotional accessibility, meaning the way texts, captions and staff make understandable a subject that intimidates many visitors.

When to go to MACRO and when to avoid it

The best time is early Saturday morning, just after 10:00, or Tuesday afternoon right after opening, at 12:00. The museum fills up mostly in the late afternoon on weekends and on opening nights, when however the game changes: if you're looking for atmosphere, the opening is the liveliest moment of the year and admission is free. If you're looking for the works, it's the worst moment of all.

August is an unusual month. The center of Rome empties out, the Salario district even more, and you may cross entire rooms alone. Anyone visiting the city in summer who can't stand the crowds at archaeological sites will find here an air-conditioned refuge with very few people. In winter, instead, the light of the skylight on the walkways is lower and more dramatic, and the building is at its best in the early afternoon.

Avoid, unless you have a specific interest, the days immediately after the close of a cycle: some rooms may be under installation and the ticket may give access to less than you expect. The ticket office says so, but it's better to know beforehand.

What's around MACRO

The Salario and Nomentano districts on foot

The neighborhood deserves a walk of its own. It's the Rome built between 1880 and 1930 for the white-collar middle class of the new capital, with apartment buildings of four or five floors, inner courtyards, wrought iron doors and a surprising number of Liberty and Deco details that nobody ever looks at. Via Nizza, Via Reggio Emilia, Via Cagliari and the parallel streets keep historic shops and neighborhood bars where you have breakfast at the counter the way people did 40 years ago. Piazza Fiume, five minutes away, is the gap in the Aurelian Walls where Porta Salaria stood, demolished in the 1920s to widen traffic. The Aurelian Walls reappear a little further on, toward Corso d'Italia.

Villa Torlonia, a quarter of an hour from MACRO

Going up Via Nomentana you reach Villa Torlonia, the park that was Mussolini's Roman residence from 1925 to 1943 and that today houses three civic museums. The Casino Nobile with its historic apartment, the Casino dei Principi and above all the Casina delle Civette, a masterpiece of eclecticism with its Liberty stained glass, are the perfect combination for a second half day. The contrast with MACRO is the most instructive part: two ideas of Roman modernity a kilometer apart and a century from each other.

The Coppedè district, 20 minutes away

A bit further north, behind Piazza Buenos Aires, opens the Coppedè district, the fantastical block designed by Gino Coppedè between 1913 and 1927, with its arch, the chandelier hanging in the middle of the street, the Fountain of the Frogs and that mix of medieval, Baroque and Liberty that has no equal in Rome. From MACRO you get there on foot in a good 20 minutes. It's free, takes half an hour to visit and gives the best photographs in the area.

Porta Pia and Umbertine Rome

On the other side, toward the center, there is Porta Pia, Michelangelo's last architectural work, begun in 1561 on commission from Pius IV, and the stretch of wall where on September 20, 1870 the bersaglieri opened the breach that ended the temporal power of the popes. Along the axis of Via XX Settembre the ministries of the new capital line up, and in a few minutes you go down toward Via Veneto and Piazza Barberini. It's the route I recommend to anyone with half a day who wants to tie the museum to the history of the city.

MACRO and Rome's other contemporary art museums

The recurring question is which to pick, MACRO or MAXXI. My answer is this: they are two different jobs. The MAXXI in Flaminio is a national museum, with two statutory collections, art and architecture, a building by Zaha Hadid that is a destination in itself and a ticket that costs more than double. MACRO is civic, smaller, more experimental, cheaper and much more unpredictable. If you have only one afternoon and want the security of a big exhibition, go to MAXXI. If you want to understand what's moving in Rome right now, come to Via Nizza.

The third leg is the National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art in Valle Giulia, which covers the 19th and 20th centuries with a permanent collection on stable display, and is the right place for those looking for the names they studied. The Museo Carlo Bilotti in the Aranciera of Villa Borghese is instead the small surprise: a few rooms, works by de Chirico and a handful of 20th century pieces, admission almost always at a modest price and a half hour well spent.

A curiosity about MACRO - Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome

The best curiosity is about color. Odile Decq imposed on the building a very rigid color code, almost like industrial signage: black and gray for circulation spaces, red for places where people talk and meet, white for the rooms where works are looked at. It's not a decorative choice and it doesn't come from the architect's personal taste: it comes from reasoning about orientation. In a building with no required route, where the walkways climb and turn and the levels blur, visitors risk constantly losing the sense of where they are. Color gives it back to them before the brain works out a floor plan.

Try noticing it next time. Leaving a white room you realize you're back in the gray of circulation, and you know instinctively that you have to look for another door. When the red appears, you know you've reached a resting point. It's an orientation device that works below the threshold of consciousness, and that in Italy has been adopted in very few museums.

The second curious element is that the red volume of the auditorium doesn't rest on the ground. It's suspended, crosses the hall in midair and its curve looms over whoever walks in. In the studio's jargon it was called the core, and everything else is organized around that core: the ramps, the balconies, the small exhibition spaces carved out of the widenings of the routes. A building that, instead of distributing the public around a void, as a traditional museum would, distributes it around a solid that floats. Put bluntly: the most spectacular part of MACRO is a piece of architecture that doesn't touch the floor, and almost nobody notices until it's pointed out.

Something nobody tells you about MACRO - Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome

The MACRO ticket is not the Musei in Comune ticket. It sounds like an accountant's detail, and yet it's the thing that sends the most people crashing into the ticket desk. Since 2018 the management has passed from the Sovrintendenza Capitolina to Azienda Speciale Palaexpo, and from that moment the museum left the ordinary civic circuit. The MIC Card, the annual card that gives residents unlimited access to the municipal museums, is no use here. The first Sunday of the month, which opens many museums of the Capitoline and state circuit for free, doesn't bring free admission to Via Nizza. The discounts are those set by the company running the museum and not those of the municipal system.

A second thing nobody says follows from this: the information you find around about MACRO is often out of date, because it describes one of the earlier setups. In the years of Luca Lo Pinto's direction admission was free, and a great many third-party pages still report that condition. Today you pay, six euros. Anyone arriving with old information feels cheated, but the model has simply changed.

The third little-known thing concerns the roof. The hanging piazza on the roof, about 2,500 square meters with surfaces of sand, gravel, stone and grasses and a blade of water, had been conceived as urban public space, accessible even to people who don't enter the museum, and connected to the street by outside ramps. In practice its opening has depended on the period, on maintenance and on programming, and it's by no means a given that you'll find it usable on the day you go. Ask at the ticket office as soon as you enter, because if it's open it's the part of the museum worth the trip.

The advice I give you for visiting MACRO - Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome

Advice number one is to go with an exhibition chosen in advance. MACRO changes program in cycles, with four, five or six projects open at the same time and staggered closing dates. Showing up without knowing what you'll find is the best way to leave with the feeling of not having understood. Open the calendar, pick the project that really interests you, and build the visit around it, using the others as a side dish.

Advice number two is about time. Count on two and a half hours for a full cycle. The video installations, which are abundant here, have actual running times from five to 40 minutes. If you walk in halfway through a screening and leave after three minutes you haven't seen the work, you've seen a fragment. Better to watch two in full than six in bits. Sit down. In the rooms there are almost always benches or cushions.

Advice number three is to combine the visit with something within a quarter of an hour's walk, because the neighborhood deserves it and because MACRO alone doesn't fill a day. The two recommended combinations are these: the museum in the morning and Villa Torlonia with the Casina delle Civette in the afternoon, or the museum followed by Coppedè and a descent toward Porta Pia. The first is a museum day, the second is an architecture day, and both are more coherent than they seem.

One last practical tip: the coat check is free and works for the whole opening time. Use it. The walkways are narrow in some spots and walking around with a backpack on your shoulders among the works is a great way to get called out by the room staff.

Another well-known fact, yet rarely cited

Everybody knows MACRO occupies a former brewery. Almost nobody knows that brewery bears the signature of Gustavo Giovannoni. From 1912 he oversaw the construction of the buildings of the Birra Peroni plant on the area bought on November 24, 1911 between Via Reggio Emilia, Via Nizza and Via Cagliari. Giovannoni was no ordinary technician: he is the architect and historian who invented the concept of building thinning out (diradamento) applied to Italian historic centers, who led Roman architectural culture for years and who helped found the capital's school of architecture. That a beer factory was entrusted to a figure of that weight tells of an era in which industrial architecture was not considered a minor genre.

The second well-known and rarely cited fact is the end date. Beer production on Via Nizza stopped in 1971, and from that moment the block entered a limbo that lasted 13 years. Between 1978 and 1982 a redevelopment plan was worked out with the city. Only in 1984 did the administration actually take over the complex, assigning it to the Municipal Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art. Work started in 1996 and in 1999 the complex was inaugurated as the Gallery's home. Between the closing of the factory and the opening of the museum, 28 years went by: a slowness that seems incredible today and that at the time was the norm for Italian industrial heritage.

Third fact: MACRO was not born as a contemporary art museum, but as the home of a municipal gallery that collected modern art, meaning 19th and early 20th century material. The 2002 name change was also a change of mission, and the older part of the civic collection took another road, that of the Galleria d'Arte Moderna on Via Francesco Crispi. Two museums, one original collection, divided by a chronological watershed.

The right photo to take at MACRO - Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome

There is only one photograph that pays off, and it isn't the one of the facade. You have to go up on the walkways, get to the point where the metal route turns around the red volume of the auditorium, and frame downward, including three things in the same shot: the curved red of the core, the black geometry of the railings and a portion of the glass hall at the back. It's the image that conveys Decq's idea, a building made of intersecting routes, and it works both vertically and horizontally.

For light, the best moment is late morning on a clear day, when the skylight sends a zenithal light that separates the levels and draws sharp shadows on the glossy floor. On overcast days the space becomes uniform and the photo loses depth. With a phone it's best to lock the exposure on the red, otherwise the automatic setting blows it out and the color becomes an orange blotch with no detail.

The second shot I recommend, if the roof is open, is from the terrace toward the neighborhood: the blade of water in the foreground reflecting the sky and, behind, the roofs and antennas of the Salario, with the dome of some church breaking the line. It's a Rome that never appears on postcards and that's exactly why it works.

A serious recommendation: before shooting inside the exhibitions, check the sign at the room entrance. Some works on loan have restrictions on reproduction rights and the ban is flagged case by case. In the common architectural spaces, on the other hand, there are normally no limits for personal use, and nobody will say anything if you give up the flash and the tripod.

Some important events that happened here in history

The first event is November 24, 1911, when Birra Peroni bought the area between Via Reggio Emilia, Via Nizza and Via Cagliari. Rome was then building its new neighborhoods northeast of the walls, and the choice to set up a production plant inside that urban grid tells you how the city worked before factories were pushed out to the outskirts. From 1912 the construction site overseen by Gustavo Giovannoni started.

The second is the end of production in 1971. The third, the complex's passage to the city in 1984, after a redevelopment plan agreed between 1978 and 1982. The fourth is the 1999 inauguration, when the restored block opened as the home of the Galleria Comunale d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Roma, on about 3,800 square meters.

The fifth event is October 11, 2002: the museum is officially inaugurated with the name MACRO, Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome, under the direction of Danilo Eccher, and in the same year the Testaccio branch opens, MACRO Future, in two pavilions of the former slaughterhouse. The sixth is from 2000-2001, with the international competition announced by the city and Odile Decq's win. The seventh is the expansion work site, opened on July 29, 2004 and closed in May 2010, and the reopening to the public on December 5, 2010.

The most recent events are institutional, but they weigh as much as the building ones. In January 2018 management passes from Musei in Comune to Azienda Speciale Palaexpo, and with it comes the MACRO Asilo season, ended in 2020. In 2020 Luca Lo Pinto takes over with the Museo per l'Immaginazione Preventiva, a mandate that closed on December 31, 2024. On March 26, 2025 Cristiana Perrella is named director, with a three year appointment. On December 11, 2025 the museum reopens to the public with a renewed setup, the cinema hall, the restaurant on the top floor, the bar on the mezzanine, the library and the study room, and the exhibitions UNAROMA, Dissonanze and Abitare le rovine del presente.

Who has passed through MACRO - Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome

The first name to mention is Auguste Rodin, who in 1913 donated to the city of Rome the bronze Bust of a Lady: a work that belongs to the story of the civic collection from which MACRO descends. The second is Gustavo Giovannoni, who built this block, when it was still a factory. The third is Odile Decq, who remade it: a French architect born in Laval in 1955, winner of the 2001 competition, a constant physical presence on the Roman work sites for six years and a polemical voice against the starchitect system in the very years when that system dominated.

Among the artists, the permanent collection is a catalog of passages: Carla Accardi, Piero Dorazio, Achille Perilli, Antonio Sanfilippo and Leoncillo for the postwar abstract season. Ettore Colla, who assembled scrap iron when nobody else did. Pino Pascali and Mario Ceroli for Arte Povera. Mario Schifano, Tano Festa, Titina Maselli and Mimmo Rotella for the Scuola di Piazza del Popolo. Then Fabio Mauri, Luigi Ontani, Enzo Cucchi, Gianni Dessì, Bruno Ceccobelli, Domenico Bianchi, Marco Tirelli and the others of the next generation, many of whom trained and studied in Rome.

On the directing side, those who have passed through here include Danilo Eccher, who inaugurated the museum in 2002, and then the curators who led the following seasons up to Giorgio de Finis, an anthropologist and filmmaker, creator of MAAM on Via Prenestina and director of MACRO Asilo, and Luca Lo Pinto, a Roman curator with an international career who directed the museum from 2020 to December 31, 2024. Today the direction is Cristiana Perrella's.

Among the international artists who have passed through the rooms in recent times are Charlemagne Palestine, an American composer and artist who closed Lo Pinto's season with Post Scriptum. Un museo dimenticato a memoria, ended on February 16, 2025. Miriam Cahn, a Swiss painter born in 1949, protagonist of the big 2026 solo show. Hito Steyerl, a German artist and theorist born in 1966. This is not a list of passing celebrities: it's the list of those who really worked here.

Quick questions about MACRO - Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome

Where is MACRO

At Via Nizza 138, 00198 Rome, in the block between Via Nizza, Via Reggio Emilia and Via Cagliari, between the Salario district and Nomentano, a few minutes on foot from Porta Pia and Piazza Fiume.

How much is the MACRO ticket

Six euros full and four euros reduced. The cinema hall has a separate ticket, seven euros full and five reduced.

Is MACRO free

Not anymore. Free admission characterized the years of the previous direction. With the reopening in December 2025 the paid ticket is back. Still free are children under six, people with disabilities with a companion, licensed tour guides, ICOM members, one companion for every 10 students and the opening events.

What are MACRO's hours

Tuesday to Friday from 12:00 to 19:00, Saturday and Sunday from 10:00 to 19:00. Last entry 30 minutes before closing.

What day is the museum closed

Monday. During installation periods between one exhibition cycle and the next, some rooms may be temporarily closed to visitors. It's best to check the official website before leaving.

Do you need to book the visit

No, booking is not required. Tickets are bought at the desk or online through the CoopCulture circuit. Booking is needed for guided tours and workshops.

Is the MIC Card valid at MACRO

No. Since 2018 the museum has been run by Azienda Speciale Palaexpo and is not part of the Musei in Comune circuit, so the civic museums card doesn't give entry here.

Is entry free on the first Sunday of the month

No. The initiative concerns other museum circuits. MACRO applies its own rates every day it's open.

How long does a visit to MACRO take

An hour and a half is the minimum with a full cycle, two and a half hours is about right. With a screening in the cinema hall it comes to half a day.

Can you take photos at the exhibitions

In the common spaces and in most rooms, yes, without flash and without a tripod, for personal use. Individual works may have restrictions flagged by a sign. If in doubt, ask the room staff.

Is MACRO wheelchair accessible

Yes. Accessible entrance, wheelchair-friendly routes, equipped restrooms, reserved parking spaces and free loan of wheelchairs.

Is there a coat check

Yes, and it's open for the whole opening time. It's worth using, because some walkways are narrow.

Is MACRO good for children

Very. Under six you get in free, from seven you pay the reduced ticket, and the museum organizes dedicated workshops between 8 and 12 euros. With small children it's better not to go over an hour and a quarter of visit.

Which exhibitions are on now at MACRO

In the current cycle, these are open: Miriam Cahn. What Looks at Me until November 15, 2026, Hito Steyerl. Mechanical Kurds until November 1, 2026, One, Five, 12. 80 Years of the Strega Prize, Amelia Rosselli, a Song in Her Space and SHE DEVIL 14 until September 20, 2026, and the Paul Thorel Prize, third edition, until August 30, 2026.

Does one ticket cover all the exhibitions

Yes. The admission ticket gives access to all the exhibitions open that day. The cinema is paid separately.

Who is the director of MACRO

The director is Cristiana Perrella, named on March 26, 2025 with a three year mandate.

Is MACRO still called Museo per l'Immaginazione Preventiva

No. That name belonged to the project of Luca Lo Pinto's direction, which ended on December 31, 2024. Today the museum presents itself under its institutional name, MACRO, Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome.

What happened to MACRO Testaccio

The branch in the former slaughterhouse no longer carries that name. The complex in Piazza Orazio Giustiniani is today the Mattatoio di Roma, a hub for research and artistic production run until 2025 by Azienda Speciale Palaexpo and then entrusted to the Fondazione Mattatoio di Roma - Città delle arti.

How many works are in MACRO's collection

About 600, mostly Italian art of the second half of the 20th century, with cores of Forma 1, Arte Povera and the Scuola di Piazza del Popolo.

Why can't you see the permanent collection

For reasons of space, conservation and the history of the collection, which was moved several times over the course of the 20th century. It is shown on rotation and the current direction has announced a dedicated path to enhance it.

Who designed MACRO

The original buildings are those of the Birra Peroni plant, whose construction was overseen by Gustavo Giovannoni starting in 1912. The contemporary expansion, with the hall, the walkways and the walkable roof, is by the French architect Odile Decq, winner of the 2001 competition and author of the work inaugurated in December 2010.

Is the rooftop terrace accessible

The roof was born as a hanging piazza open to the public, but its usability depends on maintenance and on the programming of the moment. Ask at the ticket office as soon as you enter.

Is there a bar or a restaurant

Yes. With the reopening of December 2025 there are a restaurant on the top floor, a bar on the mezzanine and a bookshop cafe, besides the library room and the study room.

How do you get to MACRO by public transit

The closest subway stations are Policlinico and Castro Pretorio on Line B, both 10 to 15 minutes on foot. The surface hub to use is Piazza Fiume, served by many bus lines, along with those of Via Nomentana and Corso d'Italia. It's best to check the line number in the transit app on the same day.

Which is better, MACRO or MAXXI

It depends on what you're looking for. MAXXI is a national museum with big exhibitions and a higher ticket. MACRO is civic, smaller, more experimental and cheaper. With only one afternoon and a wish for a big exhibition, MAXXI. To understand what's moving in Rome right now, MACRO.

What can you see in the neighborhood

Villa Torlonia with the Casina delle Civette a quarter of an hour on foot, the Coppedè district 20 minutes away, Porta Pia and the stretch of the Aurelian Walls toward Piazza Fiume and Corso d'Italia, and the Galleria d'Arte Moderna on Via Francesco Crispi going down toward Via Veneto.

Are there guided tours

Yes, by reservation: 100 euros per group, 80 euros for school groups. To organize, write to the museum Monday to Friday, between 09:30 and 17:00.

If I had to say in one line why I go back to MACRO more often than to any other Roman museum, I'd say this: it's the only place in the city where I can walk in without knowing what I'll find and walk out with an open discussion. Six euros, two hours, a neighborhood nobody has ever shown you. Go with a clear mind, go up to the walkways right away, and give the works the time they ask for instead of the time you decided to give them.

Article written by the editorial team of TourLeaderPro, contact them for Private/Corporate/V.I.P. Tours and Experiences.

Planning a trip to Rome? The English-language guides to visiting the city are on ItalyPlanner.com.