Rome’s first pictures museum desires to be a European heavyweight

From the April 2026 problem of Apollo.

Former slaughterhouses make for glorious exhibition venues. These post-industrial areas, with their excessive ceilings and enormous volumes designed for the dispatch of tons of of animals a day, are the best dimension for installations and monumental artworks. Across Europe, disused abattoirs have been tailored for cultural use, from Les Abattoirs in Toulouse to the Matadero in Madrid or the brand new Plato Contemporary Art Gallery in Ostrava within the Czech Republic. Rome is the newest metropolis to catch on because it converts its enormous Mattatoio complicated right into a cultural centre, with a brand new museum devoted to pictures at its coronary heart.

The slaughterhouse complicated is made up of a number of pavilions laid out symmetrically, every constructed out of beige brick, the corners capped with pocked white limestone blocks. Evocative, even poetic names – for these unfamiliar with Italian butchering vocabulary, at the very least – are written in elegant black capitals above the entrances: the Vitellara (veal room), the Tripperia (the place tripe was ready) and La Pelanda dei Suini (the place pigs had been skinned and processed), which now constitutes a multi-functional artwork and efficiency area. The Centro della Fotografia is positioned within the former macello, a 1,500sqm corridor the place the animals had been butchered.

The skeleton of the constructing is unbroken and sure components of its industrial previous are nonetheless seen: a pulley system with its field and crank within the nook, previous pipework and black steel girders curving throughout the ceiling like a miniature railway above guests’ heads. Everything else feels very fashionable. Umberto Marroni, director of the Fondazione Mattatoio, the organisation managing the slaughterhouse’s conversion, tells me that the design ‘has only three colours: white, anthracite, which is the grey of the cast-iron elements, and an ochre colour, which can be seen in the parquet flooring and the underside of the roof’. Display partitions that may be moved and the lighting design enable for full flexibility in relation to exhibition planning.

The pictures museum opened on 29 January. The most important corridor and one a part of the higher flooring has been given over to an exhibition of works by Irving Penn, with the majority of the works drawn from the collections of the Maison Européenne de la Photographie (MEP) in Paris, and a smaller show of labor by the modern Italian photographer Silvia Camporesi. The centre’s collaboration with MEP indicators that it desires to be counted amongst different pictures museum heavyweights in Europe.

Marroni tells me that the centre had greater than 10,000 guests in simply three weeks. There’s clearly an urge for food for it, so why did it take so lengthy for Rome to get its first pictures museum? ‘In Rome, antiquity is what is important – also in purely economic terms,’ Marroni says. ‘The city has to finance the maintenance of extensive ancient cultural heritage, so it has always been more difficult for contemporary art to establish itself here,’ he explains, including that the town’s modern artwork museum, the MAXXI, opened in 2010, lengthy after different European capitals first arrange comparable establishments.

The Irving Penn present – the primary devoted to him within the metropolis – presents a smattering of images throughout the arc of his profession, from black-and-white pictures of the city vernacular of the American South to ethnographic work in Peru and different locations. Penn is a grasp of portraits and this present incorporates a beneficiant choice. Penn mentioned, ‘I can get obsessed by anything if I look at it long enough,’ and it’s arduous to not grow to be obsessed in flip by a portrait of the playwright John Osborne and his hunched again, the way in which his neck melts into the background, or the numerous trend images of the mannequin Lisa Fonssagrives, sculptural in a black robe that hews her silhouette right into a diamond, or draped in a Balenciaga coat as she arches her eyebrows in amusement.

Upstairs, a room devoted to Penn’s nonetheless lifes leads into the Silvia Camporesi exhibition, ‘The Right Time and Place’, which opens with images of the pavilion earlier than its renovation. Camporesi has lengthy been fascinated by each rural and concrete landscapes which are a sort of no-man’s land: areas which are decaying or deserted, neither in use nor destroyed. The Mattatoio itself suits into this class. Most of the buildings within the complicated had been left deserted for years after the slaughterhouse was decommissioned in 1975 after which utilized by the municipality as a storage depot. Bureaucracy and crimson tape have stunted its growth ever since.

Much of the world continues to be a constructing website. From the higher flooring of the Centro della Fotografia, by means of the home windows casting cheese-shaped blocks of brilliant winter solar on to the picket flooring, you possibly can see scaffolding draped throughout the pavilion reverse. Iron girders hyperlink this corridor to the subsequent, like a clunky exoskeleton laid over the entire complicated. Some of the buildings are a part of the structure school of Roma Tre college, whereas others will open to the general public as a part of what metropolis authorities are calling a ‘Città delle Arti’, a city-within-a-city of arts and tradition. Rome has invested greater than €90 million into the positioning – a big chunk of which comes from Covid-19 restoration funds from the European Union – with building set to be accomplished in 2027.

This new metropolis is being constructed piece by piece and there are questions on the way it will match into the native neighbourhood. On one facet of the slaughterhouse is the stylish Testaccio market, the place Roman road meals has quickly introduced the world onto TikTok algorithms and vacationer itineraries and, on the opposite facet, the Città dell’Altra Economia, a bohemian neighborhood area with an natural cafe that hosts occasions and farmer’s markets. When I used to be there in February, a Mercatino delle Streghe – actually, a witchy road market – had arrange on the automotive park simply exterior the slaughterhouse, with stalls promoting gems, incense and moon-shaped jewelry. A lady sat on a plastic chair, eyes closed and face turned to the solar, as a person providing ‘energy treatment’ moved his palms slowly over the define of her physique from half a metre away. Groups of scholars sitting on Monobloc chairs smoked rolled-up cigarettes and performed playing cards, whereas younger mother and father ingesting bottled beer watched their youngsters race round them on scooters. Testaccio is leagues behind its neighbour Trastevere when it comes to touristification, however there are fears that this new arts hub will speed up the gentrification that has already begun.

The president of the Fondazione Mattatoio, Manuela Veronelli, reassures me that there’ll proceed to be free exhibitions and actions for locals, alongside museums with an entry payment just like the Centro della Fotografia. ‘The slaughterhouse is certainly a symbolic place for residents,’ she says, acknowledging {that a} stability needs to be discovered between offering tradition for the neighborhood and making a viable enterprise. But, as has occurred elsewhere within the metropolis, the siren track of earning profits from vacationers might show too troublesome to withstand.

‘Irving Penn: Photographs 1939–2007’ and ‘Silvia Camporesi: The Right Time and Place’ are each on the Centro della Fotografia, Rome, till 29 June. 

From the April 2026 problem of Apollo.