Rome owes its beauty to the great artistic and architectural assets it came into from its past: monuments, churches, squares, streets, palaces… Nevertheless, in the last few years, the town has managed to show outstanding openness to the present.

The series of erection sites ready to introduce themselves amongst the treasures of the capital is countless: new museums, cultural and exhibition spaces, and – mainly – large architectural projects. First of all the Auditorium, the “Town of Music” designed by Renzo Piano, and, also, the Ara Pacis Museum and the church of Tor Tre Teste by architect Richard Meier, the Biblioteca Hertziana, the forthcoming Centro Congressi Italia in Eur by Massimiliano Fuksas, to mention but a few.

Rome is also soon having two significant museums dedicated to contemporary art: the new Macro, designed by Odile Decq, and Maxxi, Center for Contemporary Arts, by Zaha Hadid.

As related to contemporary art, many are the signs of awakening: from the new galleries which surface in the artistic scenario of the town, to events which conjugate antiquity to contemporaneity.

Thus, Rome has been successful in attracting also the attention of the international public. On December 15th 2007, for instance, the famous American gallery director Larry Gagosian is opening a new space in via Francesco Crispi. He states that Rome “has always been an irreplaceable source of inspiration for the artists”.

Contemporary art is not only a new status symbol, but also a sign of vitality within the cultural panorama of a town which is showing its commitment to the preservation of the present for the future generations.

Referring to any artistic institution which deals with contemporaneity, the British curator David Thorp emphasizes: “I expect an art institution of the 21st century to be flexible, sincere, democratic, multicultural, contradictory and audacious... I expect it to love the artists, to take care of the public … and to remain open late”. Just like Roma oggi.