Rome in the World

Curated by Ricky Burdett and sponsored by ANCE ROMA - ACER (the association of building contractors in Rome and its province), the exhibition hosted in the ground floor spaces of MAXXI offers visitors an unconventional portrait of Rome. The exhibition highlights the contradictions, stratifications and complexities of a modern city, but also Rome’s unique history, its imaginative dimension and its cultural and symbolic resonance.

A comparison with seventeen big cities around the world (Paris, London, Berlin, New York, Beijing, Lagos, Tokyo, Mexico City, São Paulo, Mumbai, Bogotá, Addis Ababa and others) places Rome in a global context, exploring key challenges and dynamics: space, mobility, the environment and society. Two different but complementary perspectives are used to investigate the essence of the city, its DNA. On the one hand, the universe of data (numbers, indicators, graphs related to the life of cities and their inhabitants), and on the other, the very idea of the Eternal City in the collective imagination of artists, writers and travellers who have frequented it over the centuries and those who live there today.

The mosaic of data, images, documents and works of art is complemented by a series of photographs by Marina Caneve, destined for the MAXXI Collection, which depicts everyday life in Rome. At the center of the exhibition is a large model of the City of Rome commissioned by MAXXI and composed of 953 terracotta tiles, on a scale of 1:7,500: a three-dimensional landscape that becomes a platform for exploring the spatial, social and environmental relationships of the city.