From the April 2026 issue of Apollo.
Ancient altars make excellent exhibition spaces. These modern industrial spaces, with high ceilings and a large size designed to send hundreds of animals a day, are the perfect size for installation and many works of art. Across Europe, disused slaughterhouses have been converted for cultural use, from Les Abattoirs in Toulouse to the Matadero in Madrid or the Plato Contemporary Art Gallery in Ostrava in the Czech Republic. Rome is the latest city to catch on as it transforms its main center of Mattatoio into a cultural center, with a new museum dedicated to photography at its heart.
The sacrificial center is made up of several symmetrically placed pavilions, each built in beige brick, the corners with white limestone blocks. Exciting, even poetic names – for those who do not know the Italian words for slaughter, at least – are written in beautiful black capitals above the doors: Vitellara (the butcher’s room), Tripperia (where the tripe was prepared) and La Pelanda dei Suini (where the pigs were prepared and prepared), which is now a place of many works of art and performance. Centro della Fotografia is in the first place the house of sacrificea 1,500sqm hall where the animals were slaughtered.
The bones of the building are still intact and some elements of the industrial past are still visible: a pulley system with a box and its back in the corner, old pipes and black metal that bends in the ceiling like a small rail above the heads of the visitors. Everything else feels modern. Umberto Marroni, the director of the Fondazione Mattatoio, the organization in charge of the transformation of the slaughterhouse, tells me that the design ‘has only three colors: white, anthracite, which is the gray of the steel, and the ocher color, which can be seen on the roof and under the roof’. Movable display walls and lighting design allows for complete flexibility when it comes to display design.
The photo museum opened on January 29. The main hall and one part of the upper floor are given over to an exhibition of the works of Irving Penn, with many works taken from the collection of the Maison Européenne de la Photography (MEP) in Paris, and a small exhibition of the work of the Italian contemporary photographer Silvia Camporesi. The collaboration of the center with MEP shows that it wants to be counted among the other heavyweights of the photography museum in Europe.
Marroni tells me that the center has had more than 10,000 visitors in just three weeks. There is clearly a desire for it, so why did it take so long for Rome to get its first photography museum? “Roma,” says Marroni. ‘The city has to finance the preservation of the heritage of the old culture, so it has been very difficult for modern art to establish itself here,’ he explains, adding that the museum of modern art, MAXXI, was opened in 2010, long after other European heads had created similar institutions.
The Irving Penn exhibition – the first dedicated to him in the city – presents a wide range of images throughout his career, from black and white portraits of South American towns to tribal work in Peru and elsewhere. Penn is an artist and this program has a good selection. Penn said, “I can be overwhelmed by anything if I look at it for a long time,” and it is difficult not to be fascinated by the image of the sports writer John Osborne and his back, the way his neck melts, or the many images of Lisa Fonssagrives fashion, carved in her diamond dress or black cover. Balenciaga coat while arching his eyebrows in amusement.
Upstairs, a room dedicated to Penn’s life continues Silvia Camporesi’s exhibition, ‘The Right Time and Place’, which opens with photographs of the pavilion before it was renovated. Camporesi has been fascinated by rural and urban areas that are a kind of no-man’s land: places that are decaying or abandoned, unused or destroyed. Mattatoio itself falls into this category. Most of the buildings were abandoned for many years after the landfill was dismantled in 1975 and used by the municipality as a storage facility. Borero and red tape have hindered their development ever since.
Most of the area is still a construction site. From the upper floor of the Centro della Fotografia, through the windows you throw the cheese-shaped winter sun bricks towards the wooden floor, you can see the scale covered in the pavilion. Metals connect this hall to the next, like a sloppy backdrop placed over the entire building. Some of the buildings are part of the architecture department of the Roma Tre university, while others will be open to the public as part of what the city authorities call ‘Città delle Arti’, a city within a city of art and culture. Rome has invested more than 90 million euros in the site – a large part of which comes from Covid-19 recovery funds from the European Union – construction will be completed in 2027.
The new town is being built piecemeal and there are questions about how it will fit into the local environment. On one side of the slaughterhouse there is the typical market of Testaccio, where Roman street food has brought the area quickly to TikTok algorithms and tourist routes, on the other side, Città dell’Altra Economia, a bohemian public area with a natural cafe that hosts events and farmers’ markets. When I was there in February, the Mercatino delle Streghe – literally, a witches’ street market – was set up in the car park outside the slaughterhouse, with stalls selling gems, incense and moon-shaped jewellery. The woman was sitting on a plastic chair, eyes closed and face facing the sun, while the man giving the ‘energy treatment’ moved his hands slowly over her body from half a meter away. Groups of students sitting on Monobloc chairs smoked rolled cigarettes and played cards, while young parents drank bottled beer and watched their children race around them on scooters. Testaccio is a league behind its neighbor Trastevere in terms of tourism, but there are fears that this new art center will accelerate the growth that has already begun.
The president of Fondazione Mattatoio, Manuela Veronelli, assures me that there will continue to be free exhibitions and activities for local residents, as well as museums with an entrance fee such as the Centro della Fotografia. ‘The abattoir is really a symbolic place for the residents,’ he says, and believes that a balance must be found between providing culture for the community and creating a successful business. But, as has happened in other parts of the city, the siren song of making money from tourists may prove too difficult to resist.
‘Irving Penn: Photographs 1939–2007’ and ‘Silvia Camporesi: The Right Time and Place’ are both at the Centro della Fotografia, Rome, until 29 June.
From the April 2026 issue of Apollo.
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