The 10 best contemporary art galleries in Rome

Galleria Continua is the Italian gallery with the widest reach and the least likely story. Mario Cristiani, Lorenzo Fiaschi and Maurizio Rigillo opened it in 1990 in a former cinema in San Gimignano, the Tuscan hill town, and from there went to Beijing in 2004, to Les Moulins, in the countryside east of Paris, in 2007, to Havana in 2015, and since then to São Paulo and Paris. In Rome it is inside The St. Regis, the grand hotel by Piazza della Repubblica, where it opened a gallery in 2020 and takes part in the life of the hotel with talks and dinners. Its artists include Michelangelo Pistoletto, Jannis Kounellis, Anish Kapoor, Antony Gormley, Ai Weiwei, Daniel Buren, Berlinde De Bruyckere, Kiki Smith, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Shilpa Gupta, Subodh Gupta, Pascale Marthine Tayou, Carlos Garaicoa, Nari Ward and JR.

The current exhibition, through December 31, is the gallery’s first with the American artist Hank Willis Thomas, set beside Man Ray: Thomas’s retroreflective works, in which a second image appears under a flash, and his marble sculptures of clasped hands and a raised fist, with Man Ray’s rayographs and solarisations. You walk in through the hotel; the gallery is open to anyone.

Richard Saltoun founded his gallery in Mayfair in 2012 and made its name by doing work that museums had left undone: recovering the feminist, conceptual and performance artists of the 1960s and after. Rome was its first space outside London, opened in March 2022 on Via Margutta, the old artists’ street under the Pincio, with a show of Bertina Lopes; New York followed in 2024. The list includes Renate Bertlmann, Rose English, Penny Slinger, Annegret Soltau, Ree Morton, Bracha L. Ettinger, Everlyn Nicodemus, Victor Burgin and Li Yuan-Chia, with artists who worked in Italy among them: Bice Lazzari, Greta Schödl, Silvia Giambrone and Ida Barbarigo.

The gallery is between shows until October 6, when it opens Brigitte Niedermair’s Madame Hirsch with a reception from 6 to 8 pm: a photographic series that follows one woman, Renate Hirsch Giacomuzzi, through a year of celebrations, travel and daily ritual. It runs to December 18. Note the hours, Tuesday to Friday, with Saturday by appointment.

T293 takes its name from its first address, Via dei Tribunali 293 in Naples, where Paola Guadagnino and Marco Altavilla opened it in 2002. It came to Rome in 2010 and became the city’s best-known gallery for a younger international generation: Claire Fontaine, Simon Denny, David Maljković, Patrizio di Massimo, Lito Kattou, Caroline Mesquita, Tris Vonna-Michell, Martin Soto Climent, Jana Schröder, Hangama Amiri and Trey Abdella show with it, as does the Rome-based painter Isabella Ducrot.

After nine years in a former industrial workshop on Via Ripense, in Trastevere, the gallery moved in December 2025 to a smaller space on Piazza del Catalone, in Borgo, a few minutes from St. Peter’s. Umico Niwa’s Daphne, Act Two, pewter figures staged over two rooms like the acts of a play, is on until October 16. The old space on Via Ripense is now the Accademia di San Luca’s gallery, showing the paintings of the Living Theatre’s Julian Beck.

Paola Capata founded Monitor in 2003 in a room of forty square meters near St. Peter’s, and in its first years it was the place in Rome to see video. Over two decades the program has turned toward painting, and the gallery now represents some of the strongest painters in Italy, Nicola Samorì, Thomas Braida, Matteo Fato and Oscar Giaconia, with the veterans Claudio Verna and Elisa Montessori and international artists such as Guido van der Werve, Nathaniel Mellors, Alexandre Singh and Peter Linde Busk. In March 2023, after twelve years on Via Sforza Cesarini in the center, it moved to a larger space in San Lorenzo, facing Piazza dell’Immacolata; it also has galleries in Lisbon and in Pereto, a village in Abruzzo.

The current exhibition, Double Solo, through November 13, pairs two artists in their twenties, one from each side of the gallery’s life: Satya Forte, from Abruzzo, who draws with hair, and the Portuguese painter Pedro Zhang. Open Tuesday to Friday from 2 to 7, and on Saturday by appointment.

Sara Zanin opened z2o in 2006 near the Colosseum, moved it to Via della Vetrina, by Piazza Navona, in 2012, and in March 2024 took it out of the center altogether, to a building with an industrial past in Testaccio. The gallery shows Italian artists across generations, Alfredo Pirri, Cesare Tacchi, Mariella Bettineschi, Silvia Camporesi, Giovanni Kronenberg, Michele Tocca and Marta Roberti, beside artists from further afield: Evgeny Antufiev, Krištof Kintera, Kaarina Kaikkonen, Ekaterina Panikanova and Hidetoshi Nagasawa. Since 2020 it has also run z2o Project, a space for site-specific work and residencies in San Saba, a short walk away.

Kronenberg’s fourth solo show with the gallery, recent sculptures and drawings, runs through October 31, and z2o Project has Luca Moscariello’s trompe-l’œil paintings until November 22. Tocca is in a two-painter show at the Fondazione Giuliani, in Ostiense, from October 8.

The newest arrival. Amanita was started by four friends, Caio Twombly, Tommaso Rositani, Jacob Hyman and Garrett Goldsmith; it ran briefly in Florence, made its name in New York, on the Bowery, and in October 2025 opened in Rome, on the ground floor of the Palazzo dei Pupazzi, a palace of 1538 on Via dei Banchi Vecchi known for the stucco figures and masks that cover its front. Twombly is a grandson of Cy Twombly, and the gallery’s list joins older painters, Alessandro Twombly and Bill Jensen, to younger ones: Eva Beresin, Daniele Milvio, Leonardo Meoni, Francesco Cima and Issen Nishigaki.

Beresin’s Fool’s Privilege, her second show with the gallery, runs through November 13: paintings and sculptures on fools and babies, the two kinds of people excused from the rules, with a large canvas of the palace itself. Lorcan O’Neill and Federica Schiavo are both within a fifteen-minute walk.