ROME.- After the success of the last edition, the Italian capital welcomes the return of the international art fair ROMA - The Road to Contemporary Art, which runs from April 2 – 5, 2009. This year, the event will not only be a great opportunity for art market professionals to meet and do business, but will also feature a series of events spread among Rome’s most beautiful sites, with a program full of appointments for both experts in the field and the general public.

The core of this multi-faceted event is ROMA, the fair itself, where artists, galleries, museums, public and private foundations, collectors, critics, curators and art publishers all come together. More than 60 galleries are hosted in the three sections of the fair :

- THE FAIR, located between the Palazzo delle Esposizioni and Palazzo Venezia, will offer visitors access to the crème de la crème of the international art market, from famous artists to renowned galleries;

- STARGATE, also between Palazzo delle Esposizioni and Palazzo Venezia, will be reserved to galleries that have been in business for less than seven years – already well established but still driven by a spirit of experimentation and innovation;

- STARTUP, in the Santo Spirito in Sassia complex, will assemble the newcomers – that is, galleries on the art scene for less than three years. ROMA offers them exposure and visibility on the international art fair circuit.

Alongside the fair, there will be a series of special cultural events: one curated by Achille Bonito Oliva and four others coordinated by Danilo Eccher.

These five collateral events, organized and directly managed by ROMA, are:

• Cose mai Viste II, curated by Achille Bonito Oliva. Installed in Palazzo Barberini, this show will focus on works within artists’ private collections, examining the recondite choices of taste, meaning and sensibility bringing one artist to own works by another.

• Solo al buio, curated by Cecilia Canziani and Andrea Viliani, at Trajan’s Market, presents video and light box works installed in the spaces of Via Biberatica and the ancient workshops in hemicycle below. The exhibition brings together the most interesting experiments in the new language of video and backlit photography in a powerfully engaging setting.

• Mediterranean, curated by Elena Lydia Scipioni, at Palazzo Rospigliosi. This show is dedicated to young artists of the Mediterranean area, with the aim of giving voice to new areas of enquiry and experimentation. Croatia, Albania, Greece, Turkey, Lebanon, Israel and Egypt are represented, as well as Spain, Provence (France) and Southern Italy – all part of the same extremely complex and vital geographical area.

• Senza Rete, curated by Lorenzo Benedetti and Caroline Corbetta, at Santo Spirito in Sassia, features the newest, youngest and boldest experimentation, with a focus on linguistic contaminations and formal randomness. It is an invitation to overload one’s curiosity in the most disparate and extreme areas of research at the outermost boundaries of art; a chance for young artists, young gallerists and collectors to test themselves against the uncertain limits and deformed perspectives of the untested.

• Accademia delle Accademie, curated by Shara Wasserman at Hadrian’s Temple brings together in one place all the foreign visual arts academies located in Rome that have artist-in-residence programs. This is a chance for the general public to see how important is the work of these institutions in promoting the artists of their home countries, as well as the degree to which Italy is involved into the international contemporary art scene. A journey accompanied by films, information, installations, debates and atmospheres, all in the same place.
In addition to the aforementioned exhibitions giving the main directional lines to the overall event, another initiative, also under the supervision of Danilo Eccher as coordinator of ROMA’s various cultural events, will be presented:

• Rolling Stones: Fifty young curators will switch places every hour for the entire duration of the fair, sharing their experience or talking about the topics they feel are most relevant to the present. A non-stop critical intervention on the themes and prospects of contemporary art located in Santo Spirito in Sassia.