Thousands of museums, archives and archaeological sites across the country will host special tours and late openings on 26–27 September. The theme for the 2026 European Heritage Days is “Heritage at Risk: Revive, Resist, Reimagine”.
Italy will take part in the 2026 edition of European Heritage Days (Giornate Europee del Patrimonio) on the weekend of Saturday 26 and Sunday 27 September, with museums, galleries, archives and archaeological sites nationwide opening for special tours, many of them to areas not normally accessible to the public. State museums will also stay open late into Saturday evening, with entry reduced to a symbolic €1 (excluding categories already entitled to free admission by law).
Now in its 35th year, European Heritage Days began life in France in 1984 as a single open-doors day for historic monuments, before the Council of Europe adopted it more widely in 1991. Since 1999 it has been run jointly with the European Commission under the shared slogan “Europe, a common heritage”. Today it is one of the continent’s largest cultural events, spanning the 48 signatory states of the European Cultural Convention, with an estimated 30,000 sites and 20 million visitors taking part across Europe each year. In Italy, the Ministry of Culture is cooridinating the event with individual museums, local authorities, universities and cultural associations organising their own programmes.
This year’s theme
The 2026 theme, “Heritage at Risk: Revive, Resist, Reimagine” (“Proteggere il patrimonio. Rinnovare, resistere, reinventare” in Italian), asks visitors to consider the pressures facing cultural sites and the work involved in keeping them alive for future generations.
It’s a theme with particular resonance in Italy this year, given last week’s storm-related flooding at both the Uffizi and Palazzo Pitti in Florence — a reminder, as much as any curated exhibition, of how fragile historic buildings and their contents can be.
What’s on
Highlights announced so far include a special evening opening until 11pm at the National Archaeological Museum in Aquileia, Friuli-Venezia Giulia, alongside free weekend-long audio-guided walking tours around the Roman ruins of Aquileia and the star-shaped Renaissance fortress town of Palmanova.
At the Reggia di Caserta, visitors can follow “Il cammino dell’acqua” (“The path of water”), a self-guided route along the palace’s monumental fountains explaining the maintenance work needed to keep them running.
In Florence, the State Archive will open its doors for free guided visits both days, alongside a Saturday-morning conference on archives and environmental themes.
Elsewhere, the Marche region’s heritage authority is opening normally inaccessible sites including the Roman settlement of Attidium near Fabriano, while the town of Cesena has arranged an itinerary taking in its historic Malatestiana Library, a museum dedicated to writer Renato Serra, and a former Second World War air-raid shelter.
Full listings, updated continuously by participating venues, are available on the Ministry of Culture’s page. You can also find information on the European Heritage Days website, which lists events across all participating countries.
