The exhibitions to see in June in Italy

June moves with the slow grace of beautiful things that don’t need explaining. You walk into a museum like you walk into a cool room on a hot summer day: looking for wonder, for quiet, for something to pull you away from the noise. The exhibitions in Italy this month are many, varied, and a little surprising. Some make machines speak, some photograph rain like it were poetry, some bring forgotten stories back to light. Every city has its own voice, every artist their own rhythm. All we have to do is choose where to begin. Comfortable shoes, open heart. The journey, as always, is all in the details.

Here are the exhibitions to see in Italy this June.

Rebecca Horn - Turin

The Castello di Rivoli hosts the first major retrospective of Rebecca Horn in an Italian museum. The exhibition, titled Cutting Through the Past, brings together more than 35 works spanning over 50 years.Her art blends the human body with machines. The show opens with rare drawings, continues with performance videos, and includes her famous kinetic sculptures.Highlights include Concert for Anarchy and the piece Cutting Through the Past with five wooden doors and a sharp metal rod. Also worth seeing: Bodylandscape, running until September 21, 2025, at Studio Trisorio in Naples.

Title: Rebecca Horn - Cutting Through the Pas

When: until September 21, 2025

Where: Museum of Contemporary Art, Rivoli, Turin

Saul Leiter - Monza

“A window covered with raindrops fascinates me more than a portrait of a celebrity.” This captures the essence of Saul Leiter, one of the greatest street photographers. The son of a famous rabbi, he refused to follow in his father's footsteps to devote himself to painting in New York. There, he met photojournalist W. Eugene Smith Richard Pousette-Dart, an exponent of Abstract Expressionism and father of the New York school, who introduced him to photography. This is the early years. Leiter spends his days portraying fogged up diner windows, reflections in puddles, silhouettes of umbrellas, wet cab windows, rain, people, objects, and buildings around his home. Searching for beauty in the ordinary, between out-of-focus shots, reflections, overlays and saturated colors, he creates multilayered images that look more like paintings than photographs and tells of the humanity that populates the streets of Manhattan. The Reggia di Monza is dedicating a major retrospective to him: 26 black-and-white photographs, 40 color photographs, 42 paintings and rare archival materials, such as original vintage magazines and a precious film document, for a total of more than 200 works. Including early experimental works and fashion photographs made during his collaborations with Harper's Bazaar.

Title: Saul Leiter – A Window Spotted with Raindrops

When: until July 27, 2025

Where: Belvedere of the Royal Palace of Monza, Monza

Tatiana Trouvé - Venice

The Pinault Collection presents Tatiana Trouvé at Palazzo Grassi. Featuring recent works like The Guardians, large drawings from the Les Dessouvenus series, and site-specific installations. Trouvé plays with different materials, from bronze to glass, and experimenting with techniques including casting and fusing, whitening and drawing, carving and threading. Thus she transforms rocks, flowers, blankets, books, suitcases and anything that inspires her into art. Those who visit the exhibition, open until Jan. 4, 2026, will find themselves in a labyrinth that leads to spatial, mental and temporal worlds that, in the words of the French-Italian artist, “connect with each other through affinities, echoes, reminiscences, and these relationships draw/trace a shared wander, without origin or end, in a completely open ecosystem.”

Title: Tatiana Trouvé – The Strange Life of Things

When: until January 4, 2026

Where: Palazzo Grassi, Venice

Cinema Pioneers - Rome

Do you know the pioneers of Italian cinema? No, we are not talking about divas like Sophia Loren or Gina Lollobrigida, but about women who, at the dawn of cinematography, with their launch helped shape the seventh art without, however, remaining in the collective memory. Until September 28, 2025, the Central Institute for Graphics in Rome does justice, restoring visibility and recognition, to thirty of them, beginning with Elvira Notari, Italy's first female director and founder of the production company Dora Film made more than one hundred films including shorts and features. Through never-before-seen materials, found films, period magazines, archival documents, private letters, scripts, photographs and sketches, the extraordinary figures of Giulia Cassini Rizzotto, Adriana Costamagna, Daisy Sylvan, Bianca Guidetti Conti and many other women who actively participated in every stage of the film production process, from directing to costumes, including editing and distribution, are discovered, leaving a deep and lasting imprint.

Title: inVisibili. Le Pioniere del Cinema

When: until September 28, 2025

Where: Central Institute for Graphics, Rome

Daniele Tamagni - Trento 

Did you watch the Met Gala 2025 dedicated to black dandyism and were enthralled? Then, you should visit Daniele Tamagni Style Is Life, an exhibition that brings together the artist's most important works. Born in Milan in 1975 Daniele Tamagni turned to photography as an adult, using his camera as a tool for social investigation. At the Trento Civic Gallery you can see 80 photographs arranged in 6 thematic sections, resulting in a cheerful, colorful exhibition in which photojournalism, street photography and fashion are mixed in. His shots in African and South American megacities show the joy of life, adaptability, authenticity, and pride of urban communities and how clothing is an identity statement, but also a political one. The absolute stars of Tamagni's work are the afrometals of Botswana; the cholitas, Bolivian wrestlers; the young dance groups of Johannesburg; and, above all, the Congolese sapeurs of the SAPE (Society of Entertainers and Elegant People), better known as the dandies of Bacongo, a neighborhood of Brazzaville in the Republic of Congo.

Title: Daniele Tamagni Style Is Life

When: until July 6, 2025

Where: Galleria Civica, Trento

Feminist and Queer Archives - Bologna

Never before has it been more important to turn the spotlight on women and queer, claiming rights, but also paying homage to the desires, struggles of those who have challenged social, gender, citizenship and identity norms before us. At MAMbo, the exhibition Resisting Oblivion shines a spotlight on feminist and queer activism. With original archives, visual and audio documents, and the contributions of transfeminist collectives, it narrates powerful stories of resistance, rights, and identity in Bologna.

Title: Resisting Oblivion – Passion and Activism in Bologna’s Feminist and Queer Archives

When: until July 6, 2025

Where: MAMbo Museum of Modern Art, Bologna

Nathalie Du Pasquier - Orani

Volare Guardare Costruire (Flying, Looking, Building) is the title of the site-specific exhibition that the Nivola Museum in Orani, near Nuoro, dedicates to Nathalie Du Pasquier. Long fascinated by the relationship between objects and the space they inhabit, the French artist—also known as a founding member of the Memphis Group—presents an expansive environmental installation that blends painting, architecture, and design. As the press release explains, curators Giuliana Altea, Antonella Camarda, and Luca Cheri, together with the artist, have conceived a series of “rooms” showcasing works created from the 1980s to today. Across this body of work, the human figure and a strong narrative quality emerge, which over the course of Du Pasquier’s career gradually shift toward still life and abstract figuration.

Title: Nathalie Du Pasquier. Volare Guardare Costruire

When: Until September 14, 2025

Where: Museo Nivola, Orani, Nuoro

Miho Tanaka - Naples

Andrea Nuovo Home Gallery in Naples presents an exhibition dedicated to Miho Tanaka, a Japanese artist living and working in Italy. The title, Into the Din, refers to the individual's relationship with space and the contrast between personal rhythms and the pace of the external world. Tanaka enjoys experimenting with classical sculptural materials, blending them with discarded elements she finds during her urban walks. From this approach come works like Untie: white terracotta confetti tied with red thread, which can be removed and taken away. In exchange, visitors are invited to leave a thought, a wish, or a word written on paper. This small gesture evokes the omikuji, the Japanese fortune paper tied to temple branches.

Title: Miho Tanaka - Into the Din

When: Until July 23, 2025

Where: Andrea Nuovo Home Gallery, Naples

The Egyptians - Ragusa

Ancient Egypt arrives in Sicily with The Egyptians and the Gifts of the Nile, an exhibition hosted at the Cathedral Museum in Ragusa. Visitors will find themselves immersed among 24 significant objects—vases, stelae, papyri, amulets, and a funerary mask—that narrate the society, religion, and artistic techniques of ancient Egypt, from the Predynastic Period through the Greco-Roman era. Among the highlights are a Predynastic terracotta vase decorated with river scenes, a model boat from the First Intermediate Period with udjat eyes painted on the hull, and the complete set of alabaster canopic jars of Ptahhotep, topped with lids shaped like the heads of the Sons of Horus.

Title: The Egyptians and the Gifts of the Nile

When: Until October 26, 2025

Where: Cathedral Museum, Ragusa

The Italian Summer - Bologna

PHOTOGRAPHED IN THE SUN. The Italian Summer through Vernacular Photography, Snapshots, and Cinema in the 20th Century is a captivating visual journey into Italy’s 20th-century beach culture. Held in Bologna, the exhibition explores summer as a time of vitality, lightness, and self-expression. Bikinis, flashbulbs, pedal boats—but also paparazzi shots and family photos—tell the story of Italy’s seaside ritual. Stars like Brigitte Bardot are soaked in myth, while anonymous beachgoers pose with inflatable mattresses and strike sculpture-like poses in flip-flops. Between provocative shorts and questionable tank tops, Italian Style mixes with seaside DIY. These are postcards of a fleeting, airy happiness that, at times, we long for.

Title: PHOTOGRAPHED IN THE SUN. The Italian Summer through Vernacular Photography, Snapshots, and Cinema in the 20th Century

When: Until July 10, 2025

Where: Galleria Spazio e Immagini, Bologna

Clément Cogitore - Venice

Clément Cogitore's The Evil Eye is the centerpiece of Espace Louis Vuitton Venice. Originally created in 2018 for the prestigious Prix Marcel Duchamp (which it went on to win) the video installation is intended as a critique of consumerism and mass manipulation. It consists of a series of overexposed images and archival footage, intended for the most diverse advertising and television purposes, placed on green screen backgrounds with, at the bottom of the screen, barcodes. These anonymous scenes thus seem to evoke an artificial happiness, highlighting how idealized and commodified spaces can lead to alienation. The Evil Eye, presented in parallel with the Architecture Biennale 2025, is part of Fondation Louis Vuitton's hors-les-murs program, an initiative that brings museum-level installations to its international spaces, including Tokyo, Munich, Beijing, Seoul, and Osaka.

Title: The Evil Eye

When: until Nov. 23, 2025

Where: Espace Louis Vuitton, Venice