Dispatch.
News updates, briefings, calls, events. Journalistic, direct.
Protecting museum collections also means keeping them open to the public
Recent thefts have drawn attention to regional museums, whose collections can be as significant as those of national institutions but are often protected with fewer resources.
Planetarium: observing Chianti through contemporary art
Five events spanning dance and visual art brought the landscape of San Casciano into conversation with the memory of its places, the transformations of the present and the questions of contemporary life.
Vicenza’s Parco della Pace: a public space built with water and time
The former Dal Molin airport has become a 65-hectare park combining flood management, biodiversity and collective life. The project is one of five finalists for the 2026 European Prize for Urban Public Space.
A princess was told photography was not a job for women. She spent seventy years proving otherwise.
Claude d'Orléans was discouraged from photojournalism in 1955 for being a woman, and a princess. An exhibition in Florence shows what she shot instead.
A Small Bronze Horse, Twenty-Five Centuries Before Marino Marini
At the Doge's Palace, the San Casciano bronzes open an exhibition about what the Etruscans and the Veneti genuinely shared: water as a threshold to the sacred.
Rome's National Library of Archaeology and Art History Just Closed Its Doors After 104 Years, and No One Can Say When They Will Reopen
On 7 September 2026, Palazzo Venezia's storied research library shut for a move to Palazzo San Felice, with no confirmed reopening date before 2027.
A Fish Survey Ship Went Looking for Cod and Hauled Up Rome
A Spanish oceanographic vessel counting fish stocks off Formentera pulled up 26 Roman amphorae and 17 crates of pottery from 1,400 metres down, purely by accident.
Five Minutes Was Too Slow to Save Renoir's Last Garden
Thieves cut four Renoir paintings from their frames at the artist's former home in Cagnes-sur-Mer, in a raid police reached five minutes too late.
The Alhambra Now Has a Digital Twin, and It Was Already Watching When the Ground Shook
Granada built a complete virtual replica of the Alhambra wired with 62 sensors. Days after launch, a swarm of earthquakes gave it its first real test.
A Buddhist Cave Carved to Face the Sunrise Has Never Left Korea, So Paris Is Building One That Can Be Touched
Seokguram's granite Buddha has never travelled. A Paris exhibition brings it near through photography, braille reliefs and, from 23 November, a hyperreal digital cave.
Cezanne never finished his bathers, and that unfinished quality became modern art's founding gesture
Cezanne's endlessly reworked bathers taught Picasso, Matisse and Malevich how to break the body. A Grand Palais show traces the debt.
George Lucas Built a Museum to Prove Illustration Belongs Beside Fine Art
The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art opens in Los Angeles this month, staking 1,200 works and a $1bn building on the argument that storytelling pictures deserve a place among the masters.
Thirty Three Thousand People Queued for One Painting, and the Prado Changed Its Mind
A Raphael altarpiece on loan from Madrid was due to leave L'Aquila in September. After 33,733 visitors, the Prado extended the loan to 3 November.
The Dealer Who Went Bankrupt Twenty Times Over Is About to Make His Family $50 Million
Sixty-two paintings that Paul Durand-Ruel bought from starving artists nobody else believed in are going to auction, still in his family's hands after more than a century.
An amphitheatre built for 60,000 spectators is about to host a play about crowd manipulation
Six archaeological sites in Campania will stage new theatre this autumn, each written to argue with the ruins it inhabits, starting with an amphitheatre that once staged Spartaco's revolt.
Five Moldovan Thieves Tried to Sell a Cézanne Abroad. They Got Caught Because Someone Recognised It
Six months after a brazen theft, three masterpieces by Cézanne, Renoir and Matisse are back on the walls of the Magnani Rocca Foundation in Parma.
A Twenty-Four-Foot Blue Man Just Became the Kennedy Center's Last Casualty
Joel Shapiro's beloved sculpture Blue is being dismantled and carted off the Kennedy Center campus, months after its creator's death, with no public explanation given.
Maria Lai never painted the sky. She sewed it, because skies should be touched, not just seen
In Naples, a show of the Sardinian artist's thread and cloth works reveals a decades-long project: turning the domestic gesture of sewing into a universal language.
Rome's pyramid opens after dark, for free, because a Japanese donor loved it enough to save it twice
After a three-year restoration funded by Italy's PNRR, the Pyramid of Cestius reopens for free day and evening visits from 4 September to 31 October 2026.
In Shenzhen, a Dinosaur Hall the Height of a Seven-Storey Building Just Redefined What a Natural History Museum Can Be
Shenzhen's new natural history museum has opened with a 21-metre dinosaur hall, the tallest gallery in one of the world's largest such museums.
Siena is opening 18,000 square metres of its old hospital that no one has been allowed to see
A new project lets visitors into the vast, unrestored wings of Santa Maria della Scala, closed since the hospital shut in 1990, before restoration begins.
Someone stole four Antonello da Messina paintings, then walked away from two of them
Thieves took three panels of a 1473 altarpiece and a Pietà from a Sicilian museum, then abandoned two outside the building. The other two are still missing.
Andy Burnham promised to send the Parthenon Marbles home. As Prime Minister, he changed his mind.
In 2023 he said 'send them back, no strings.' Now Prime Minister, Burnham says it's the British Museum's call. The desire for the deal has not gone away, only the man willing to demand it.
The great archive of French draughtsmanship was never in the Louvre. It was in 28 houses no one can name.
170 sheets from 28 anonymous lenders in Amiens. Three quarters have never been shown. The real cabinet of French drawing was never public.