The Museum of the Other and the Elsewhere

I arrived in Rome at the end of May, 2025. The 31-degree heat settled over me like a blanket.

I had a knot of excitement in my stomach — it felt like visiting an old friend. The city I had fallen in love with the moment I laid eyes on it over a decade ago. I've visited Rome several times, each trip peeling back another layer, yet I had never seen it like this. Crowds beyond comprehension. Queues that seemed to have no beginning or end.

It was the Jubilee Year — the Catholic Church's once-in-a-quarter-century celebration — and Rome was swollen with pilgrims, tourists, and news crews. The death of one Pope and the arrival of another still hung in the air. Military jets rehearsed for Republic Day on June 2, streaking the sky with the green, white, and red of the Italian flag. Down on the ground, the Giro d'Italia wound through the city streets — the final stage passing right under my hotel window.

The queue for the Vatican snaked out of sight, a ribbon of bodies in the relentless sun. I didn't join it. I had another line in mind: the one for Caravaggio.

Even with my ticket booked well in advance, I had to wait outside Palazzo Barberini, whilst people with an earlier slot got to drink in the genius. There was a pack of giggling school children pushing and shoving and breaking line, not old enough to understand the enormity of what they were about to witness – the most significant collection of Caravaggio's works ever assembled. Twenty-four masterpieces, many rarely seen, glowed in the dimmed rooms.

His light was the kind that carves into shadow, a language as fluent in darkness as in revelation.

His subjects, so relevant. His John The Baptist looking, in his beauty, almost like a modern day model in an expensive ad campaign.

I challenge anyone to be unmoved by Caravaggio's work and his story¹. His trials and his rebelliousness resulting in such extraordinary works of art that reach across centuries with their message.

I had recently learned of another quite different exhibition of art, far away from the richness of the Monuments and Palazzos. MAAM. The Museo dell'Altro e dell'Altrove, which translates to The Museum of the Other and Elsewhere.

MAAM was founded in 2012 on the eastern edge of the city, in a former salami factory that had been occupied by housing activists in 2009 to shelter Italian and migrant families in need. The residents named their settlement Metropoliz, città meticcia — a "mixed city," a place where people of many backgrounds could defend and value each other's rights.

Anthropologist and curator Giorgio de Finis invited artists to contribute, and over time the walls, stairwells, and abandoned rooms of the factory became canvases for international street art. The works were not purchased but donated, and inseparable from the lives of the families who lived among them. Today, more than 200 pieces cover the complex, blending with the rhythms of daily life. It is both home and gallery, survival and resistance — a declaration that art belongs to everyone, not only those who can afford museum tickets.

Though it calls itself a museum, MAAM resists definition. It is at once fragile and defiant, threatened by eviction yet constantly enriched by new voices. Many local artists are invited to engage in collaborations and performances there. Art does not sit behind glass but bleeds into kitchens, classrooms, and sleeping quarters. It insists that creativity belongs not only in Palazzos, but also in the hands of the displaced, the precarious, the forgotten. In this way, it becomes both gallery and sanctuary, a place where survival and imagination coexist.

I very much wanted to experience this other side of Rome.

The public is allowed in only on Saturdays from 10.30am, a condition of its gallery status. Two buses, a train, and a walk would have taken me there, but the hotel staff warned me about navigating the area alone with no Italian so I took a taxi.

So, at 10.30 sharp, I arrived at the gates. No queue. No sign of an open day. Just sun, heat, and a wall of mailboxes bolted to iron doors. I circled the perimeter looking for another entrance — nothing. I took photographs of murals bleeding faded colour across the factory's external skin.

After a while, two children cycled out, letting the gates clang shut behind them without so much as a glance in my direction.

Eventually, a man on a bike arrived and unlatched the gate. When he turned to look at me standing awkwardly, I showed him my camera and said, "Journalista, Australia," I pointed inside and at the sign for the open day. He shrugged as if to say 'it happens', but then he let me through.

He was Romanian, he told me in broken Italian. We both laughed at the "Mexico" stamped across his T-shirt. He gestured that where he was going I could not follow as there were children sleeping, but that I could look around elsewhere. Then he vanished, leaving me completely alone.

The place felt deserted, half asleep in the sun. I wandered between buildings, taking photos, slipping into shadowy interiors. In one, I found stairs leading to a schoolroom — battered desks, walls covered with murals.

It really hit me: the difference between the children at Palazzo Barberini, shepherded past priceless paintings as part of their curriculum, and the children here, growing up within art but in circumstances shaped by displacement and uncertainty.

I wanted to sit down and cry. I have felt the comfort of knowing exactly who I am and where I fit in this world. I wondered if the people of MAAM — artists, families, migrants — ever feel the same.

I couldn't ignore the invisible but tangible thread tying Caravaggio to this very different place. An insistence on confronting darkness while holding onto the possibility of light. Both inviting us to look deep within and explore the world through another's gaze in a way that watching the news cannot. To set aside our privilege and sit with our humanity. To be uncomfortable, but to profoundly gain from this discomfort.

I wonder if Carravaggio had grown up in a community like MAAM, would his story have been different. If he were alive today, I can almost see his genius spilling directly onto concrete walls — his instinct for light and shadow reborn as graffiti. Urgent and unfiltered.

John Berger once wrote: "What we see is always influenced by a host of assumptions concerning the nature of beauty, truth, civilisation, form, taste, class, and gender."

Art shows up everywhere. Creativity will always find a way to make sense of a discordant world. The richness of an inner life, whether nurtured in a palazzo or surviving in a run-down factory, won't necessarily shield us from misfortune. But perhaps it can save us from breaking.

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¹ By all accounts, the 16th century Italian painter Michelangelo Caravaggio was a troubled soul. A traumatic childhood left him orphaned by the plague and with a profound sense of abandonment that hardened into an angry, rebellious disposition. With no one to guide him in tempering his volatility, he spiraled into violence – culminating in the death of an adversary in a street fight and his subsequent exile from Rome as a murderer. He eventually died in exile under mysterious circumstances, though some believe his chaotic painting practices exposed him to lead poisoning, a condition known to fuel violent behaviour. There is such irony in seeing Caravaggio’s works now displayed in exalted palaces, when the man himself moved more easily among society’s margins.