‘Sappho’ is an exhibition dedicated to the only major surviving female voice in archaic Greek literature: Sappho of Lesbos.
The exhibition will be held at the Farnese Aviaries on the Palatine Hill, within the Colosseum Archaeological Park, from 15 October 2026 to 31 January 2027.

The exhibition, promoted by the Colosseum Archaeological Park and organised by Electa, is curated by Silvia Romani.
It represents the second instalment of the exhibition project dedicated to the most prominent female figures of antiquity, following on from the exhibition dedicated to Penelope (19 September 2024 – 12 January 2025) held in the same venues.

Sappho is not merely portrayed: she is invoked as a presence, just as the poetess herself summoned her Aphrodite to her side at the end of the 7th century BC. Her verses thus once again become voice and body, scent and light – an experience capable of engaging both the senses and the memory.
The exhibition comprises two complementary strands: the historical and poetic Sappho, and the legendary and popular Sappho, in a continuous interplay between reality and myth, antiquity and modernity.

In the first pavilion of the Uccelliere, the focus is on the ‘real Sappho’, reconstructed through material artefacts from antiquity and their long visual legacy: figurative vases, sculptures, paintings and manuscripts paint a picture of a poetess aware of the immortal nature of poetry, celebrated by the ancients as the ‘tenth Muse’. This section is permeated by a powerful sensory experience that draws on two central images from the Sapphic imagination: the plunge and the moon. The plunge – an extreme gesture, ambivalent between death and immortality – is evoked as a visual and auditory experience, alongside the moon, a constant presence in the poetic fragments and in their literary and artistic legacy, which becomes an architectural and symbolic element, aided by an evocative projection capable of amplifying the contemplative and nocturnal dimension of Sappho’s poetry.

The second pavilion of the Uccelliere is dedicated to the legend of Sappho, to her enduring legacy and metamorphoses from the nineteenth century right through to pop culture. Here, the poetess becomes an icon, a muse, a projective figure, traversing Art Nouveau and Art Deco aesthetics, Victorian imagery and modern reinventions. The exhibition takes the form of an artificial, interior garden, with images and photographs evoking the atmosphere of nineteenth-century gardens and the earliest examples of modern female mythology. The scent of roses in the space accentuates the mood evoked by the fragments of Sappho’s poetry.

The Farnese Aviaries, with their unique character as spaces suspended between historic architecture and the garden, offer themselves as the ideal setting in which to restore to Sappho not so much an impossible biography as an experience.