MACRO Comes Back to Life: The Reopening Redrawing Rome’s Cultural Map
The MACRO has reopened its doors and, more than an inauguration, it felt like a declaration of love to the city: Rome as living matter, diffuse energy, a perpetual attempt at reinvention. Cristiana Perrella, the new artistic director, presented a porous, inhabitable museum — a cultural organism not meant to be contemplated, but crossed and experienced. At the opening the other evening, many well-known figures from the Italian and international art and cultural scenes were in attendance. Among them were Alicja Kwade, Paolo Canevari, Beatrice Bulgari, Ines Musumeci Greco, Alessia Caruso Fendi, Veronica Siciliani Fendi, Giuliana Benassi, Alfredo Pirri, Alessandro Rabottini, Marco Delogu, Eva Fabbris, Quayola, Lina Pallotta, Leonardo Bigazzi, Cristiano Grisogoni, Sidival Fila, Andrea Salvino, Andrea Viliani, Theo Eshetu, and Lucrezia Calabrò Visconti.
The 2025–2026 season unfolds as a sentimental map of the city, an atlas of its metamorphoses. Four exhibitions opened simultaneously, like a polyphonic “good morning”. “UNAROMA”, curated by Luca Lo Pinto and Cristiana Perrella, is a large group show capturing the vibrancy of the city’s artistic scene. “One Day You’ll Understand”, also curated by Perrella, traces the 25-year history of the Dissonanze festival, which between 2000 and 2010 turned Rome into an international hub for electronic music, digital culture, and art. Then comes “Sorelle senza nome”, Jonathas de Andrade’s solo exhibition, also curated by Cristiana Perrella, commissioned by the Dicastery for Culture and Education of the Holy See for the Conciliazione 5 project and produced by Fondazione In Between Art Film; while “Abitare le rovine del presente”, curated by Giulia Fiocca and Lorenzo Romito (Stalker), is an investigation into forms of grassroots urban regeneration. All these exhibitions and the entire program are promoted by the Department of Culture of Rome Capital and the Palaexpo Special Company.
There’s also a dramatic twist: the new MACRO cinema, a permanent screening room that turns the museum into a kind of diffuse, miniature Cinecittà. The inaugural program, Cine-città, has already welcomed emerging filmmakers presenting their work, while Sunday mornings open with Rome as told by the authors who inhabit and observe it.
Surrounding it all is a continuous flow of performances, concerts, workshops, and talks, already setting a nearly cardiac rhythm in motion — the public program as a warm, collective engine. With this reopening, Perrella has restored MACRO’s most natural vocation: to be an open, accessible place, permeable to the desires of the city.
On December 11, it wasn’t just a museum that reopened: an ecosystem was reactivated. Rome once again sees itself reflected in one of its most irregular — and therefore most truthful — mirrors. A MACRO that is alive, at last. And profoundly Roman.
Text: Germano D’Acquisto
Photos: Niccolò Campita
