World Tourism Blog

Italy is opening its first national museum for contemporary arts and architecture in a bid to shed its image as merely a keeper of a glorious artistic past.

The ⁈llion ($223 million) Maxxi cultural center opens Saturday, for a limited weekend run before its full-fledged opening in a few months. The museum, located in a residential area of Rome, was designed by Zaha Hadid, the Iraqi-born architect who was the first woman to win the prestigious Pritzker Architecture Prize in 2004.

The Culture Ministry decided to build the museum in 1998, recognizing that the country that produced Giotto, Michelangelo and Bernini — the avant-garde artists of their times — must continue to promote contemporary creativity if it wants to have a cultural heritage in the future.

“It is inconceivable for this very long flow of Italian creativity to be interrupted and do without the promotion and support which, over past centuries, have generally kindled it,” said Pio Baldi, head of the foundation that runs the museum.

The center, officially called the National Museum of the XXI Century Arts, is the latest in a series of cutting-edge architectural projects to be built in the Eternal City, which is better known for its Roman ruins, Baroque basilicas and Renaissance palazzi.

Renzo Piano’s Auditorium opened in 2002, giving Rome its first major-league concert hall. More recently and controversially, Richard Meier’s Ara Pacis museum, which houses a 2,000 year-old altar, opened in 2005. Critics complained the box-like shell was a modern blot in Rome’s historic center — to some, a gas station blocks away from the Spanish Steps.

No such protests befell Hadid’s design, which is located on the grounds of a former military barracks in Rome’s Flaminio neighborhood, far from the cobblestoned streets of the center but close enough to be reached on public transport and near the new concert hall.

Hadid said she intended the space to be an “urban cultural center,” an arts campus with indoor and outdoor exhibition spaces. The building itself — a sleek, windowed box on top of a box — is made of cement walls, steel stairs and a glass roof, giving the galleries a neutral backdrop illuminated by filtered natural light.

“I see Maxxi as an immersive urban environment for the exchange of ideas, feeding the cultural vitality of the city,” she said.

Indeed, the museum is designed to be a research workshop of sorts, not just exhibiting contemporary art and architecture but incorporating contemporary design, fashion, film and advertising in a multidisciplinary cultural center. Hard money training

Italy is one of the most visited tourist countries. There are famous places like Venice, Florence, Siena, Milan, Naples, The Amalfi coast, Capri, the Lake Region, Sicily, Sardinia, the Alps and of course Rome. Famous travel places are the ruins of Pompei, the Capitole, vineyards in Tuscany, Sicily with Mt. Etna, the coastline of the Adriatic Sea or the Alps.

Italy, united in 1861, has significantly contributed to the cultural and social development of the entire Mediterranean area. Many cultures and civilizations have existed there since prehistoric times.

Culturally and linguistically, the origins of Italian history can be traced back to the 9th century BC, when earliest accounts date the presence of Italic tribes in modern central Italy. Linguistically they are divided into Oscans , Umbrians and Latins. Later the Latin culture became dominant, as Rome emerged as dominant city around 350 BC. Other pre-Roman civilizations include Magna Graecia in Southern Italy and the earlier Etruscan civilization, which flourished between 900 and 100 BC in the Center North.

After the Roman Republic and Empire that dominated this part of the world for many centuries came an Italy whose people would make immeasurable contributions to the development of European philosophy, science, and art during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Dominated by city-states for much of’ the medieval and Renaissance period, the Italian peninsula also experienced several foreign dominations. Parts of Italy were annexed to the Spanish, the Austrian and Napoleon’s empire, while the Vatican maintained control over the central part of it, before the Italian Peninsula was eventually liberated and unified amidst much struggle in the 19th and 20th centuries.