Appointments for Cini Ambassador 2026

The Fondazione Giorgio Cini hosts a unique archive of documents, books, images and artworks over the last seventy years, it has served as a crucible of ideas, fostering fertile dialogue between cultures. Is a meeting place for artists, writers, philosophers, poets, scientists and musicians from all over the world.

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Cini Ambassador is the only programme that allows unfettered exploration of this long history, yet with a gaze towards the future and the cultural and social challenges that await us.

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Being a Cini Ambassador means having exclusive priority access to the Foundation’s initiatives as well as visits to the rooms, archives and collections along with the protagonists of research. Being a Cini Ambassador offers many privileges, including free admission to exhibitions at the Palazzo Cini Gallery in San Vio throughout the year. Being a Cini Ambassador means coming into direct contact with the research conducted in the Foundation’s Institutes and Research Centres.

Again in 2026, there will be numerous activities and special days dedicat ed exclusively to the Cini Ambassadors.

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On 27 February, the fifteenth-century tapestry Entrance into Palestine of the Army of Vespasian from the Vittorio Cini Collection returns to the Fondazione Giorgio Cini. After a long and delicate restoration, carried out by Open Care in its Milan workshops and presented in Rome in the exhibition Restituzioni 2025.

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20 March is dedicated to the unveiling of Valentin Lefevre’s The Dream of Jacob, the painting at the centre of the wooden vault of the mon umental staircase designed by architect Baldassare Longhena, also the re sult of a major restoration project carried out with the support of the San Marco Group.

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On 20 May, the Intercultural Institute of Comparative Music Studies presents the world premiere of a performance by Kapila Venu, one of the leading exponents of Küțiyätțam theatre in southern India, with the per formance of an art that has been included in the UNESCO Intangible Cul tural Heritage since 2001.

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In September, the fourth edition of Homo Faber is held in cooperation with the Michelangelo Foundation, curated by Es Devlin and featuring a selection of the world’s finest representatives of artistic craftsmanship. On 11 September, the project undertaken in collaboration with fuse”, an Italian interdisciplinary studio with countless participations in the world’s leading art festivals, is presented: My library is on fire, a project of the Fondazione Giorgio Cini’s Digital Centre ARCHIVe. Thanks to the use of digital technologies and artificial intelligence, documentary heritage thus becomes a field of experimentation and research.

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On 9 November, the Institute of Music opens the Nino Rota Archive, which has been preserved and studied for thirty years by the Fondazione Giorgio Cini, for the Ambassadors.

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On 9 December there is an invitation is to discover the Fondazione Giorgio Cini’s Historical Archive for the first time. Thanks to the support of the Bank of Italy and a project by the Secretary General Renata Codello, in recent years a vast documentary heritage has been ordered and made accessible and searchable. Papers, letters, notes and testimonies reveal the dense web of relationships that the Foundation has woven with intellectu als, artists and a range of leading twentieth-century figures. The Founda tion’s archive thus opens up as a new space of living memory, capable of nourishing research and opening up new perspectives for the future.

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Finally, on 10 December, the appointments will come to an end with a meeting dedicated to the great artist Paolo Poli and his rich archival collection, acquired in 2019 by the Institute of Theatre and Opera, to be presented by the artist’s sister, Lucia Poli.