Inside the world’s only inhabited art gallery

To live among art is predominantly the reality of old money oligarchs and tech millionaires with kitsch tastes, but a community in Rome is showing that the privilege doesn’t have to be the exclusive preserve of the 1%. The Italian capital, which has had an inseparable relationship with fine arts across millennia, has many unexpected corners to find beauty, but it does lack accessible housing. That’s why last April, an ex-slaughterhouse in Rome’s often ignored, decaying eastern suburbs became the first officially recognised inhabited art gallery on Earth.

“MAAM is half contemporary museum, half squat,” says founder and curator Giorgio De Finis. Its exterior is lined with street art, political messages, and vivid colour. The smells of a home kitchen and the chiming sounds of laughter announce an intimate, warm space – not what one would traditionally associate with a museum. Its 500-plus artworks, splashed across its walls, ceilings and floors, represent the cold, post-industrial history of the building, while simultaneously bringing it to life. It’s chaotic, even contradictory, but there’s nothing like this in the art world – it’s both a home to art, and as the sum of its works, a fluid piece of art itself.

The walls of the MAAM, or the Museum of the Other and the Elsewhere, contain a self-regulated city named Metropoliz, named after the village in Asterix that resists the attacks of Roman troops. Its network of corridors and high ceilings are home to 200 people from Italian, Roma, and migrant backgrounds, including families and children, who have transformed the abandoned salami factory into their own protected settlement.

De Finis, an urban anthropologist and former curator of Rome’s leading contemporary art gallery, MACRO (Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome), discovered the building in 2009 when it had just become occupied. Before the idea of a full-blown museum came about, he returned to the factory in 2011 with an art project, which eventually developed into a documentary: Space Metropoliz. “More than depicting how the inhabitants of Metropoliz live, we created a space-themed game, a surrealist project” composed of a telescope on the roof, a space rocket made of recycled materials, and seminars by scientists and writers. “The idea was to shed light on the housing crisis: the inhabitants, tired of living on the fringes of society and fearing eviction, will go and live on the moon.”

The project continued to evolve until 2012, when the gallery was born, and since then it has hosted the work of over 800 artists. The walls burst with a diverse range of works from the abstract to the absurd, to the anti-establishment. Dismembered eyes and animals meet dissected pigs in a mixture of blood, aliens, and messages of hope. A towering ‘Fart’ sign looks down into the building’s courtyard, as a symbol that art and creativity doesn’t have to be confined to the highbrow.

“Art is an activity that does not produce functional things, but brings value. Yet those who lack what they need cannot think about dreams, so we brought them to the residents of Metropoliz. What we experimented with was also a message: those at the bottom do not just have the right to a roof, they also have the right to a museum. In rights there is also beauty, culture, exchange.”

Although most people in Metropoliz had never even been to a museum, they soon started to appreciate its value: the presence of art became an assurance against eviction. “[For some], if you evict 200 people it has less impact than destroying 200 works of art,” says de Finis. Living among Rome’s squats is to live in constant fear of eviction – of being reported to the authorities. Since the local government acknowledged the gallery’s existence and granted it legal status, everyone inside has been sleeping a lot easier. “It was funny to see people from the authorities who had wanted to report us, saying: ‘Ah what a beautiful project!’ Only art has the power to do that.”

The mayor of Rome, Roberto Gualtieri, visited Metropoliz in April 2024, marking official recognition that it had never received before. “No active politician would enter before, as this would acknowledge and accept the existence of a squat,” says de Finis. Following this visit, the mayor plans to present a project at City Hall in spring that will see state-funded conversion of Metropoliz to official museum standards. “It’ll be cleaner and there will be toilets, but we’ll ensure that the things that make this place special are preserved.”

Legitimacy has already helped shift the mindsets of residents: from shame in being a squatter, to pride in what their space had accomplished. “At school, the children didn't say where they lived before, but now they say, with pride, ‘I live in the museum.’” Because of this legal recognition, the residents will be rehoused to newly built social apartments as part of the most ambitious social housing construction drive in decades. Metropoliz’s families would live in purpose-built homes, with rain dripping through the ceiling and freezing winters to remain in the past. Construction is hoped to commence in 2026.

“There will be no more laundry hanging in the halls, it will be a museum with a home, but no longer an inhabited museum. It’s a big win, as no one will be getting evicted.” De Finis learned that occupied buildings protect themselves better if they open themselves to art – “it’s a sort of armour”, but it also creates space for more curious inhabitants to take care of the home that surrounds them.

Not unlike the building that hosts it, the art itself has to be adaptable. Murals are often bearers of footballs being flung against their surfaces, while the sculptures have scars from darts thrown by children. “The residents of MAAM are involved in the works within it”, says Paola Romoli Venturi, an artist who has provided installations and conducted workshops in Metropoliz. “Those who live in a museum eventually become part of the art.”

It presents an alternative, more participatory vision for art, which across much of the world is roped off and hidden behind glass boxes in galleries that are run by, and often meant for, a select few. It’s perhaps seen best in Michelangelo Pistoletto’s ‘Venere degli Stracci’ (‘Venus of rags’) in the museum. The statue was brought to the museum by curator Francesco Saverio Teruzzi, who decided to allow residents and visitors to contribute with their own used clothing. “We used rags that were a part of someone’s life, which in the work became a symbol of marginality,” explains Teruzzi.

The artists also brought embellishments and material improvements to the lives of the residents. Davide Dormino created a piece called ‘Scala Reale’ (‘royal flush’, or literally, royal stairway), after stumbling on a half-destroyed step of a staircase that carries dozens of people to the apartments from the common areas every day. So, “it was rebuilt in Cor-Ten steel, transforming it into a real work of reclamation of the place, with the aim of making the ascent and descent safe for the citizens of Metropoliz. Also, children use it to learn to count.” It is one of Dormino’s favourite works: “People kept telling me: ‘This is art!’ I will never forget the children’s gratitude.”

There are also ephemeral projects that aren’t painted on the walls, but have left a mark on its audiences. Workshops, seminars, lessons, conferences, are all but the beginning of “a universe of things that can pass through these walls”, if they should ever be too full for art, says MAAM’s curator. Artist Venturi recalls a multilingual reading of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, after which a child asked if the document could remain inside her home. It still hangs in the dining room where residents share meals.

The artist’s experience working in this communal, multi-purpose studio was a lesson in collaboration. “There is always someone passing by, asking questions, and if you need help, you can always find a resident or another artist willing to lend a hand.” 

Unfortunately though, the surrounding area has not always welcomed Metropoliz’s residents. The local area of Tor Sapienza has seen racism against migrants, and on occasion, violent outbursts. However, the wider world’s reception has been very different: “the first to celebrate MAAM were writers who came here from the New York Times. But the neighbourhood still sees it as a place inhabited by gypsies,” says de Finis.

In many ways, MAAM exists within its own idealistic vision, blocked out from the capitalist grind of the world beyond. Currently, it functions entirely without a budget. “We operate outside of the market,” de Finis explains. It focuses instead on the best kind of exchanges, those that are not “functional”. Its only sources of income are the communal lunches, which take place every Saturday when Metropoliz opens its house to the public. Before a designated kitchen team was assembled, a different family would cook a dish each week, charging visitors €10 per plate. The tradition highlighted the cultural diversity of the residents, with a different cuisine being showcased each week – from Moroccan couscous to Romanian stew.

It also created a space for different worlds to meet. Alongside museum guests, the lunches brought together “the Peruvian resident covered in tattoos alongside the astrophysicist. We sat them on the same table, since these meetings would not have happened in any other way,” according to de Finis. The key economic factor to those who made MAAM possible is exactly this: sharing and exchange. “It’s a concrete utopia that also brings results – it builds public housing and brings another museum to Rome.”

When decisions affecting the whole group need to be made, a series of assemblies are organised, with discussions continued until a consensus is reached. The system affirmed the right to housing for all, but cohabitation carries compromise. “There are rules that apply to everyone and it doesn't matter what your customs and religious rules are.” Notably, although most of Metropoliz’s inhabitants were open to living among art, a small minority of residents were initally resistant to the idea of a museum, with some instances of vandalism on the works during its early days.

The MAAM experiment has been just one way that Giorgio de Finis has tried to make art more accessible. His book ‘Il Museo Ovunque’ (‘The museum everywhere’, 2017) covers his attempt at creating a museum with no money. He deployed 70 works of art around Formello, a small province outside of Rome. In houses, shops, pizzerias, municipal offices, at a gas station, paintings hung in hidden corners, “like a museum easter egg hunt”.

Although it has now closed its metaphorical doors, de Finis says that the museum never existed. He continues to “experiment with museum modalities” to further the pursuit of accessible art – he is heading up the ongoing construction of a new ‘Museum of the Suburbs’, which the city council entrusted him with. The concept intends to bring together different experiments and ideas of how cities, and especially its further reaches, can be made different, through visual art and performance.

MAAM was a response to a housing emergency. What emerged from it is a “a tattooed body” – a quilt of stories from those whose voices are often misunderstood. As de Finis says, “The project was very useful to the residents, to make them discover many pieces of the world, while Rome was able to discover them.”

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