LE STAGIONI

Every two years, the Venice Art Biennale turns the entire city into a sprawling urban gallery that aims take the pulse of the contemporary art scene. Titled ‘In Minor Keys’, the 61st edition pairs a curated central exhibition with national pavilions and collateral events scattered across the city. The Londra Palace Venezia is a short stroll from the Biennale’s two main venues, the former naval boatyards of the Arsenale and the Giardini park, where many of the most important national pavilions are clustered. Allow at least four days to take in the full range of offerings, and consider a fall visit, when the shows are generally less crowded.

It’s always a joy to visit the palazzo that was the home and atelier of great Venetian artist, designer and cultural icon Mariano Fortuny. An ably curated exhibition programme is the icing on the cake. The latest show to be hosted by this absorbing house-museum is a retrospective dedicated to Austrian artist Erwin Wurm, whose ironic, provocative sculptures use absurdity to highlight all that is extraordinary about our ‘ordinary’ world.

Photo Markus Gradwohl

If you associate Venetian architecture and interiors exclusively with the distant past, you need to visit the Olivetti Store in Piazza San Marco. Commissioned at the end of the 1950s by enlightened entrepreneur Adriano Olivetti, local architectural genius Carlo Scarpa proved that it was possible to create an authentically Venetian style of Modernism. Now managed by Italian heritage association FAI, the space plays host during the 2026 Art Biennale to an exhibition of around twenty works by Argentinian artist Leandro Elrich that blur the distinctions between man, nature and the cosmos, creating new hybrid forms that question fixed identities.

Photo Duccio Benvenuti