MAXXI, the National Museum of XXI Century Arts, is the first Italian national institution devoted to contemporary creativity. Conceived as a broad cultural campus, MAXXI is managed by a Foundation constituted in the July of 2009 by the Ministry for Cultural Heritage and Activities and headed by Giovanna Melandri. Since December 2013 Hou Hanru has been the Artistic Director of the museum, which includes MAXXI Architettura, directed by Margherita Guccione, and MAXXI Arte, directed by Anna Mattirolo.

The programming of the activities – exhibitions, workshops, conferences, shows, projections, educational projects – reflects MAXXI’s vocation as a place for the conservation and exhibition of its collections but also, and above all, a laboratory for cultural experimentation and innovation, for the study, research and production of the aesthetic contents of our time.

• MAXXI Architettura

MAXXI Architettura is the first national museum of architecture to be established in Italy, its roots in the Italian cultural and territorial context defining its identity. Two distinct spirits coexist in the museum, one devoted to the historicizing of the architecture of the 20th Century and the other responding to issues of the present, interpreting the expectations of present day society. A museum that is both historical and contemporary therefore; one in which past and present intersect, adopting forms and methods suitable for developing a particular knowledge path and analysing trends and personalities, cultural models and social behaviours.

The museum undertakes research and promotional activities including temporary exhibitions offering visitors ever diverse opportunities for fruition and in-depth examination. Acquisitions, production activities and research promoted directly by the museum and jointly with other institutions derive from the cultural programme.

The museum’s activities explore the architectural discipline’s confines and intersections with other creative fields and are intended to present to the public the new idioms, the variety of the issues, the multiplicity of subjects and the trends characterising current national and international research. These activities include Focus sessions featuring interviews about Italian architecture.

MAXXI Architettura is a museum, archive, library and mediatheque (MAXXI RESEARCH), and above all the physical space that welcomes, involves and introduces people of all ages to architecture. The MAXXI Architettura Collections (20th Century Collections, 21st Century Collections, Photography Collections), curated and managed by the Architecture Archives Centre and the Photography Centre, comprise all those artefacts and documents that, in diverse forms, represent the material and conceptual complexity of architecture through its evolutionary processes: from design idea to physical realisation, through to its use and insertion in the physical and cultural context.

• MAXXI Arte stands as a contemporary museum set within unconventional architecture, a point of departure for a new museographic experience that breaks with the past.


• MAXXI Research, Education and Training is a workshop offering the public avant-garde facilities and equipment for the analysis, study and comprehension of contemporary artistic phenomena.


• MAXXI Development is a department which brings together various offices and responsibilities. It promotes and transmits MAXXI’s multifaceted identity and its wealth of proposals and commits to matching private capital with public resources to ensure a multidisciplinary cultural offer.