21st Contemporary Art Day: Italy celebrates creativity

On Saturday, October 4, 2025, a new chapter will open in the relationship between the public and contemporary art in Italy with the twenty-first edition of the Giornata del Contemporaneo (Contemporary Art Day), a unique event promoted by AMACI in collaboration with the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity of the Ministry of Culture and the Directorate for Cultural Diplomacy of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. For the twenty-first consecutive year, twenty-six major Italian museums, together with thousands of public and private institutions throughout the country, will welcome visitors with free admission for a day entirely dedicated to the art of the present. The initiative, now well established, aims to bring contemporary creativity closer to an ever-wider audience and to offer opportunities for experience, dialogue, and knowledge.

As tradition dictates, the program of the Giornata del Contemporaneo is distinguished by a kaleidoscopic mosaic of exhibitions, workshops, events, and initiatives, conceived both in-person and online, to highlight the central role of visual arts in the national cultural fabric. The goal is to bridge the gap between institutions and civil society, transforming museums and art spaces into places of participation, learning, and transversal discovery, where different generations and backgrounds meet through the common language of creativity.

In 2025, the event will extend beyond Italy’s borders: the Giornata del Contemporaneo will in fact reach a truly international scale, continuing until October 10 through the project Giornata del Contemporaneo | Italian Contemporary Art. The collaboration with the diplomatic-consular network of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, together with embassies, consulates, and Italian Cultural Institutes, will allow the energy of Italian contemporary art to spread worldwide. This global projection reinforces the vocation of the Giornata as a bridge between national artistic production and the international stage, offering new audiences the chance to discover the multiple languages of the latest creative generations.

The guiding theme of this twenty-first edition is education, understood broadly as a shared path of growth, awareness, and dialogue. This thematic choice derives from AMACI’s internal reflection work, carried out in a study day last March, and welcomed by participating museums as an act of responsibility toward society, education, and the future of the Italian art system. To educate does not only mean to transmit content but also to create opportunities for encounter and dialogue, to set in motion processes of research and maturation that involve artists, curators, educators, audiences, and territories.

The 2025 edition also keeps alive the tradition, begun in 2006, of entrusting an artist or a collective with the creation of the official image of the event. This year’s protagonist is Atelier dell’Errore (AdE), a collective directed by Luca Santiago Mora and composed of twelve young neurodivergent artists working at the Collezione Maramotti in Reggio Emilia. Born as a child neuropsychiatry workshop, AdE is today recognized nationally and internationally for the visionary strength of its research and the originality of its practice, poised between visual art and performance. Their artistic practice, deeply rooted in the personal and collective experiences of those who live neurodivergence, has evolved into a space of freedom, inclusiveness, and growth. AdE explores the creative power born from error, transforming vulnerability into a resource, isolation into connection, and limitation into a possibility of expression.

For the 2025 edition, the work chosen as the symbolic image is Unknown Pleasures – The Shelter, a poetic synthesis of an artistically and humanly intense story. The creation stems from the reworking of the large sail Ade Vela Rapido, composed of fifty emergency blankets assembled as a “protective body” for Pier Paolo Pasolini’s boat used in Oedipus Rex. During a restoration, the sail was transformed by two members of the collective into a temporary shelter, fragile yet laden with meaning: a space that invites one to imagine an affective freedom, in a play of dream and reality. In the work, the memory of a great Italian intellectual, theatrical culture, the metaphor of the journey, and the universal need for protection and visibility for every excluded or unrecognized desire all converge.

The initiative’s calendar is enriched by multiple strands: from activities coordinated by AMACI member museums to those promoted abroad thanks to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, from initiatives spread across the “Luoghi del Contemporaneo” (Places of the Contemporary) surveyed by the Ministry, to the packed program of cultural institutions distributed throughout Italy. All participating museums and organizations will offer free admission, inviting the public to discover the best of the exhibitions, meetings, workshops, and events designed for the occasion, and to actively take part in the cultural and creative life of their communities.

In addition to the institutional support already mentioned, the event enjoys the patronage of the European Commission, the Chamber of Deputies, the Conference of Regions, the Autonomous Provinces, UPI, ANCI, and ICOM Italy. Thanks to its partnership with Alfasigma and the technical sponsorship of Artshell, it is confirmed as one of Italy’s most far-reaching cultural events. The strength of the Giornata del Contemporaneo lies in its ability to bring together diverse energies, mobilize transversal networks, highlight both well-known and emerging artists and operators, and set in motion virtuous processes of discovery and participation that transcend geographic and social boundaries.

All details of the program and the possibility to register for events will, as always, be available on the official website. The twenty-first edition renews the spirit of openness, exchange, and accessibility that has animated the Giornata since 2005, making it a widespread and shared celebration of Italian contemporary creativity. The 2025 edition emerges not as a simple event but as a true national laboratory: an opportunity in which the themes of education, inclusion, emotional growth, and artistic experimentation find a home in museums, workshops, squares, schools, and digital platforms, multiplying languages and opportunities for encounters among people, territories, and generations.