The exhibitions to see in October in Italy From Nan Goldin's slideshows in Milan to Jim Dine's Pop Art in Naples
October in Italy smells of new wine and of footsteps crunching on dry leaves. It’s the month when landscapes dress in warm colors and museums light up like beacons, ready to tell new stories. The exhibition calendar in Italy is a lively mosaic: from Jim Dine’s Pop Art to Dalí’s surrealism, from Letizia Battaglia’s courageous photography to Rodney Smith’s suspended atmospheres. Some bring the past back to life, some reinvent everyday objects, some stage the fragility of the human condition. Every exhibition is a small adventure, an opportunity to slow down, step into a historic palace or an industrial space, and be surprised.
And in October, among canvases and installations, there’s also an event that brings art into an entirely new dimension: Digital Jewelry Week. From October 6 to 12, 2025, thanks to the Lov3D platform, independent designers, established brands, and students from 29 countries will present their fine jewelry creations in immersive digital showrooms, accessible without apps or downloads. An experience that combines storytelling, interactive navigation, and the highest visual quality. And on October 11, at Spazio Lenovo in Milan, the digital will meet the physical in an event that marks the most ambitious edition ever of DJW.
The exhibitions to see in October in Italy
Jim Dine - Naples
From October 10, 2025, to February 10, 2026, Castel Nuovo becomes the beating heart of an extraordinary encounter between the medieval and Renaissance grandeur of Maschio Angioino and the sculptures of Jim Dine, one of the great protagonists of American Pop Art. The exhibition Elysian Fields brings together 29 works that don’t merely stand on display but seem to dialogue with the spaces they occupy. Like the 23 large sculptures of classically inspired heads or The Gate where Venus sleeps, a bronze and steel door, converse with the ancient stones of the Palatine Chapel. Bronzes rise as mysterious presences, figures recalling sleeping deities, installations inviting visitors to walk between myth and matter. The exhibition feels like an initiatory journey in which contemporary art doesn’t overshadow the past but inhabits, provokes, and illuminates it. Among the exhibitions in Naples, this one promises to leave visitors with that rare feeling of having witnessed something both ancient and new at the same time.
Title: Elysian Fields
When: October 10, 2025 – February 10, 2026
Where: Castel Nuovo, Naples
Made in Italy - Florence
At the Origins of Made in Italy takes visitors into a world of precious fabrics, embroidery, and sartorial details that tell the story of the first steps of a phenomenon that became legendary. More than fifty garments and accessories, along with photographs and archival materials, reconstruct the atmosphere of an Italy that, between Fascism and the postwar years, began to envision itself on international catwalks. It’s not only elegance but also the boldness of those who transformed craft into industry and craftsmanship into a global language. Walking through the halls, one senses the energy of a country rediscovering beauty and reinventing it. For fashion lovers, but also for those who want to better understand how a myth is born, this is one of the exhibitions in Florence worth a trip. Proof of its success is that, instead of ending on September 28 as originally planned, it has been extended until November 2, 2025, offering visitors another month to discover the roots of Made in Italy.
Title: Moda in Luce 1925–1955. Alle origini del Made in Italy
When: Until November 2, 2025
Where: Museo della Moda e del Costume, Palazzo Pitti, Florence
Nan Goldin - Milan
Milan, a metropolis that has always welcomed the avant-garde, is preparing for a memorable event: from October 11, 2025, to February 15, 2026, Pirelli HangarBicocca devotes its vast spaces to Nan Goldin with the retrospective This Will Not End Well. For the first time in Europe, the American artist, known for her visual diaries steeped in intimacy and pain, will be presented as a filmmaker. The exhibition is a kaleidoscope of slideshows and sound installations that become immersive environments thanks to pavilions designed by architect Hala Wardé. The journey moves from her iconic The Ballad of Sexual Dependency and The Other Side to recent works such as Memory Lost, which tell stories of love, fragility, addiction, and the struggle for freedom. Goldin doesn’t seek to please. She unsettles, disturbs, yet at the same time delivers poetry. Her work is not just art but living testimony, an open wound and at once a song of resilience. Among the October exhibitions in Milan, this is the most radical and intense, capable of changing the perspective of those who enter.
Title: This Will Not End Well
When: October 11, 2025 – February 15, 2026
Where: Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan
Rodney Smith - Rovigo
From October 4, 2025, to February 1, 2026, Palazzo Roverella in Rovigo becomes the poetic stage for Rodney Smith’s visions, with a retrospective that brings more than one hundred photographs by the New York master to Italy for the first time. His images, never digitally retouched and illuminated only by natural light, depict a world suspended between reality and fairy tale, rigor and play. Men in bowler hats climbing trees, elegant figures suspended in midair, scenarios that seem born from a Magritte dream or a Hitchcock film. Everything speaks of irony and wonder. His photography is a fairy tale for adults, an invitation to look beyond the surface. Walking through the halls, one finds themselves smiling and marveling, like children discovering a magic trick.
Title: Rodney Smith. Fotografia tra reale e surreale
When: October 4, 2025 – February 1, 2026
Where: Roverella Palace, Rovigo
Poetik der Gegenstände – Palermo
Palermo, a city of layers and resilience, hosts the exhibition Poetik der Gegenstände from October 4 to December 6, 2025, at the Cantieri Culturali alla Zisa. A project that brings Sicilian and German artists into dialogue, from Tine Bay Lührssen to Rossella Palazzolo, creating a narrative fabric where everyday objects become symbols, amulets, and metaphors. Photographs, installations, sculptures, and paintings tell the silent life of things: a kitchen utensil, a chair, a fragment of fabric transform into witnesses of memory and identity. The poetics of objects is a subdued song that runs through the ages, a reflection on the resilience of things as men and stories pass. It’s an invitation to pause and see what surrounds us differently, discovering the hidden poetic potential in the things we use every day. One of the most intimate and conceptual exhibitions in Palermo, capable of transforming the simple into the extraordinary.
Title: Poetik der Gegenstände (Poetica degli oggetti)
When: October 4 – December 6, 2025
Where: Haus der Kunst, Cantieri Culturali alla Zisa, Palermo
Dalì - Rome
Rome becomes the setting to celebrate the genius of Salvador Dalí with the exhibition Revolution and Tradition, hosted at Palazzo Cipolla from October 17, 2025, to February 1, 2026. Sixty works, including paintings, drawings, and audiovisual materials, reveal the Catalan master’s constant dialogue with art history. Dalí engages with Velázquez and Raphael, reinterprets the Renaissance, and challenges Picasso in a creative wrestling match that shaped the 20th century. The galleries transform into a visionary theater, where surrealism is not an escape but a rewriting of reality. The exhibition restores the image of a complex artist, always suspended between a desire for subversion and a nostalgia for tradition. Visitors will enter a universe where visionary madness meets the discipline of tradition.
Title: Dalí. Rivoluzione e tradizione
When: October 17, 2025 – February 1, 2026
Where: Cipolla Palace, Rome
Marc Chagall - Ferrara
In Ferrara, from October 11, 2025, to February 8, 2026, Palazzo dei Diamanti fills with the poetic atmospheres of Marc Chagall. The exhibition Chagall, Witness of His Time brings together two hundred works, including paintings, engravings, and immersive installations. There is the enchantment of lovers flying over villages, the melancholy of symbolic animals, the joy of bright colors that seem to tell of a world where memory becomes poetry. But there is also the harsh memory of the short century: persecution, exile, loss. Chagall manages to transform pain into a universal image, to speak with the same intensity of joy and tragedy. This is an exhibition that does not simply dazzle with beauty but invites reflection. Without a doubt, one of the most moving art events of the autumn.
Title: Chagall, testimone del suo tempo
When: October 11, 2025 – February 8, 2026
Where: Diamanti Palace, Ferrara
Mona Hatoum - Orani (Nuoro)
The Nivola Museum in Orani, in the heart of Sardinia, hosts Behind the Seen, a solo exhibition by Mona Hatoum. Her works, often made of barbed wire, cages, or household utensils transformed into traps, speak of fragility, identity, and geopolitical tensions. For this occasion, the artist collaborated with local artisans, creating new works that weave traditional knowledge with global languages. Walking through the galleries, visitors encounter familiar objects suddenly turned threatening, humble materials charged with political meaning. It is a path that unsettles, that invites us to rethink the boundary between intimacy and violence, between home and imprisonment. Not to be missed is Twelve Windows, which addresses themes of diaspora and exiled identity. Created in collaboration with the Lebanese association Inaash, it recreates visual and physical barriers through twelve panels of traditional Palestinian embroidery suspended in space on red laundry lines.
Title: Mona Hatoum. Behind the Seen
When: October 4, 2025 – March 2, 2026
Where: Nivola Museum, Orani (Nuoro)
Allison Katz - Milan
Gió Marconi Gallery hosts Foundations, an exhibition marking the return of Allison Katz to Italy. The Canadian artist, known for her layered and ironic approach, intertwines family memories, embroidery, wordplay, and visual motifs in a new body of work. Painting, bronze, and printed silk coexist in a journey that questions the very foundations of art: what does it mean to paint today? Which memories and genealogies are embedded in an artistic gesture?. Her research is intimate and universal at once, capable of turning a private detail into collective reflection. Katz’s style is both witty and refined, able to connect the intimacy of the painterly gesture with collective history. Fun fact: the exhibition also includes a series of dynamic embroideries created by Katz’s paternal grandmother, the ninety-year-old artist Edna Katz Silver.
Title: Foundations
When: October 3 – November 30, 2025
Where: Gió Marconi Gallery, Milan
Letizia Battaglia - Forlì
From October 18, 2025, to January 11, 2026, the San Domenico Civic Museum in Forlì hosts Letizia Battaglia. The Work: 1970–2020, the largest retrospective dedicated to the Palermo-born photographer. More than two hundred photographs, along with documents and footage, tell the story of a woman who turned photography into a political and poetic act, a tool of love and denunciation. Images of mafia massacres coexist with portraits of children at play, women resisting, neighborhoods surviving despite everything. Battaglia didn’t just photograph—she shouted through her camera, giving Sicily back its complexity. For this reason, the exhibition is both painful and moving, revealing beauty even where it seemed impossible to find it. Among photographic exhibitions in Italy, this is a milestone not easily forgotten.
Title: Letizia Battaglia L’opera: 1970-2020
When: October 18, 2025 – January 11, 2026
Where: San Domenico Civic Museum, Forlì
