If a good morning can be read in the morning, the calendar of exhibitions awaiting us as we return from the summer break in our cities only heralds a culturally rich year ahead.
The month of September will be wonderfully full of openings, from major cities like Milan, Rome, Turin, and Bologna to art towns such as Mantua, Parma, and Ferrara.
We have selected the ten most important and fascinating exhibitions not to be missed in Italy in September.
Kandinsky in Rome
From September 15, 2026 to February 14, 2027, at Palazzo Bonaparte in Rome, a major exhibition devoted to Kandinsky unfolds. After 25 years, the artist returns to the spotlight with an internationally scaled show that brings together over 70 works, primarily drawn from the Centre Pompidou in Paris, which guards the most important collection of the artist in the world thanks to the generous bequest of his wife Nina Kandinsky. The exhibition guides visitors through the entire arc of the master’s life and work, recounting the extraordinary transformation of a man who, after studying Law and Political Economy at Moscow University and pursuing a promising academic career, chose to abandon it all to devote himself to painting. His journey traverses historical eras, countries, and great passions, culminating in the birth of a wholly new artistic language: abstraction. Through five sections, the exhibition itinerary retraces all the stages of the artist’s search. An exceptional opportunity to admire masterpieces that rarely leave the French capital.
China in Turin
Palazzo Falletti di Barolo in Turin hosts, from September 11, 2026 to January 10, 2027, the FAN HO exhibition. The master of photography from Hong Kong receives an unprecedented Italian survey dedicated to a Chinese street photographer. The exhibition comprises one hundred photographs, mostly in black and white, tracing Fan Ho’s career (1931–2016). Ho, through an aesthetic pursuit balancing realism and abstraction, captured the urban life and scenery of Hong Kong. His work stands out for applying principles of painterly composition to photography, particularly an instinct for geometric synthesis.
Man Ray in Parma
Fifty years after the passing of one of the most brilliant and versatile artists of the 20th century in Paris on November 18, 1976, the exhibition “Man Ray: Everything” (September 12 – December 13, 2026) at Villa dei Capolavori, the Magnani-Rocca Foundation’s site in Mamiano di Traversetolo near Parma, brings together more than 250 works across photographs, paintings, objects, sculptures, graphics, books, and films. It is the most complete retrospective ever dedicated to Man Ray in Italy. Often, major exhibitions have privileged painting or photography; this show embraces all disciplines practiced by the artist—photography, painting, sculpture, design, graphics, publishing, cinema—with equal dignity. Among the works on display are Le Violon d’Ingres (1924), the iconic back-portrait of friend and muse Kiki de Montparnasse, Tears, The Prayer, Anatomy, and Noire et Blanche.
Italian Art in Milan
From September 15, 2026 to October 14, 2026, at Palazzo Lombardia in Milan, artists who helped shape the history of Italian art will be exhibited—well-known and lesser-known names alike. Notable figures include Guttuso, Sassu, Carrà, Baj, Monti, Persicalli, Bracchi, Evangelina Gemma Alciati, the first woman enrolled in an Art Academy (the one in Turin), among others—who will be presented together for the first time in a free-ranging exhibition. A total of 90 works by 31 20th-century artists will be on view in a striking show titled Intimate Visions. The 20th Century Secret hosted in the Spazio IsolaSET. These evocative and important works, born from the creative output of Italian painters of the century, form an original and unprecedented exhibition path.
From Monet to Van Gogh to Kandinsky in Ferrara
From September 19 to January 10, 2027, the Palazzo dei Diamanti in Ferrara hosts the unmissable exhibition “From Monet to Van Gogh to Kandinsky”, a monumental journey through the pivotal milestones of modernity via Claude Monet, Vincent van Gogh, Vasily Kandinsky, and Piet Mondrian. At the heart of this narrative is the landscape—both natural and urban—and modern life, which become the vantage point from which an era’s relationship between the artist and the visible world is radically redefined, paving the way for new modes of perception and representation of reality. Structured into nine chapters, the itinerary brings together 120 works across paintings, drawings, and engravings that trace the main stages of painting’s evolution across the 19th and 20th centuries.
Salvador Dalí in Milan
From September 24, 2026 to January 31, 2027, the Milanese exhibition season opens at Palazzo Reale with “Dalí and Fashion”, a major show dedicated for the first time to the influence of Salvador Dalí on the world of fashion and to the decisive role that fashion played in shaping his creative universe. An internationally scaled exhibition project launching during Milano Fashion Week 2026, it brings together 200 works and documents from the most important collections and museum institutions around the world. An unprecedented journey into Dalí’s universe through the language of fashion, spanning surrealism, identity, and contemporary imagination.
From Leonardo to Caravaggio in Mantova
From September 26, 2026 to January 10, 2027, the monumental rooms of Palazzo Te in Mantua host the exhibition “Inventing Nature. Leonardo, Arcimboldo, Caravaggio”. In dialogue with the palace’s exceptional decorative apparatus conceived by Giulio Romano, the show celebrates the relationship between the natural world, artistic output, and court culture in the sixteenth century. Works by great artists such as Leonardo, Arcimboldo, Annibale and Agostino Carracci, and Caravaggio, together with a rich selection of sculptures, drawings, precious objects, exotic materials, and automata loaned from major Italian and European institutions, will guide visitors toward the experience of nature as a phenomenon to be investigated through science, art, and technology. In seven thematic sections—Creating, Destroying, Surprising, Knowing, Reproducing, Astonishing, and Animating—each housed in a magnificently frescoed room (from the Chamber of Stuccoes to the Chamber of the Giants), the show presents the different visions of nature coexisting within Renaissance culture.
Brueghel in Milan
From September 29, 2026 to January 31, 2027, Palazzo Reale in Milan hosts “The Bruegels. The Origins of European Painting Genres”, the first major Italian exhibition dedicated to the famous Flemish dynasty. The show traces the three generations of Bruegel: Pieter Bruegel the Elder, who transfigures Bosch’s visions into a land- and humanity-grounded art, yet still intelligible to a cultivated audience; Pieter Brueghel the Younger, who codifies and disseminates these models on a commercial scale, consolidating the family “brand”; and Jan Brueghel the Elder, a cosmopolitan spirit who, during his Italian and European sojourns, attracted prestigious commissions such as Cardinal Federico Borromeo. From snowy landscapes to storms, from still lifes to rural life and battles, this family of artists played a fundamental role in laying the foundations for landscape, battle, still life, and popular scenes that would define 17th-century European painting, the system later known as the “genres of painting” that shaped modern European painting as we know it today.
Leonardo da Vinci in Bologna
From September 24, 2026 to January 17, 2027, Palazzo Pallavicini in Bologna hosts the exhibition “Leonardo’s Machines. Genius and Innovation”, presenting about thirty machines reconstructed in wood and other materials used in Leonardo’s era, faithfully following Leonardo’s drawings and studies. The route laid out in the frescoed halls of the Bolognese palace recounts Leonardo’s ingenuity through creations such as the bicycle, the famous 1493 drawing that inspired it, the revolutionary parachute, the glider, and the helicopter, which together represent a real challenge to gravity. Pure mechanics take form through a perpetual-motion hammer, a wind gauge, and complex lifting systems, such as pulleys with weights and the two-weight pulley. The exhibition also features essential devices in the history of modern engineering, including the writing balance, the gear shift, the piston, and the jack.
Victor Man in Florence
From September 26, 2026 to March 7, 2027, the Museo Novecento in Florence hosts a solo exhibition dedicated to Victor Man, a painter of Romanian origin, featuring about 25 paintings in a parcours that explores recurring themes such as motherhood, portraiture and self-portrait, still life, and the female figure. A mysterious artist who probes the human psyche, he is regarded as the contemporary painter of chiaroscuro inherited from the 17th century; critics have likened him to Francisco de Goya, El Greco, and Diego Velázquez. His works, often portraits, have rarely been shown to the public.
