The major summer exhibitions head toward closing between Florence and Venice

The month of August marks, for two of the most significant exhibitions of the year in Italy, opposite phases of their respective calendars. In Florence, the major project dedicated to Mark Rothko closes to the public on August 23, giving the final weeks added value for those who have not yet had the chance to visit before its definitive closure.

This news currently comes from a single source (Civonline); no independent confirmation is available regarding the details reported.

In Venice, on the other hand, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection continues its programming until October 19, 2026 with the exhibition “Peggy Guggenheim in London. Birth of a Collector”. The exhibition traces the collector’s London years and the season of the Guggenheim Jeune gallery, active between 1938 and 1939, a foundational period for her work as a patron and for the shaping of the taste that would later characterize her Venetian collection.

Among the works on display are pieces by Jean Arp, Wassily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian, Henry Moore and Yves Tanguy: five names representing as many directions of European art between the two wars, which the exhibition uses to reconstruct the critical and personal journey through which Peggy Guggenheim developed as a collector before permanently relocating to Venice.

The contrast between the two exhibitions — one drawing to a close, the other still with over two months of programming ahead — reflects the typical calendar of Italy’s cultural offerings during the summer period, in which major projects opened in previous months reach their natural end date while others, opened more recently or with a longer timeframe, remain among the few reasons not to entirely desert the art cities during the weeks of peak exodus.

For those in Venice during this period, the exhibition on the Guggenheim Collection thus remains a fixed point of the cultural offerings, while in Florence the window for Rothko is progressively narrowing toward the end of the month.