Stadiums are machines of emotion and, at the same time, precise infrastructures. They have generated chants, rites, and collective traumas. They have marked neighborhoods, created citadels, and transformed the way we live the city. Before they are sports facilities, however, stadiums are an idea: places that organize bodies, orchestrate emotions, and mirror a city. The exhibition is currently on view at MAXXI, “Stadiums. Architecture and Myth,” lines up centuries of forms and uses, from Greece to the present, and attempts to read the stadium both as architecture and as a cultural phenomenon.

With curators Manuel Orazi, Fabio Salomoni, and Moira Valeri, we traverse personal memory, Italy’s history of stadiums, and the present and future of places that are not only containers for sport, but civic architectures reflecting a society in constant evolution.

Manuel Orazi: “I remember as a child the first time I went with my father to my city’s stadium to watch Maceratese. What comes to mind is a heated derby with Civitanova: a very common experience, I’d say, as many first times are in provincial stadiums. But I was never a regular; I followed football more from a distance. That said, stadiums have never been just infrastructures: they animate neighborhoods, give them character, go hand in hand with other facilities, and in certain cases become true sports citadels. Every city has its own story, but some turning points are clear to see.

“The exhibition was first and foremost meant as a proposal to the museum that responds to a huge, urgent issue: across Italy—not only because of UEFA or FIFA requirements—we have old, often dilapidated facilities. Between the NRRP, upgrades, and new strategies, many cities are taking action on their stadiums: not only Serie A teams seeking ownership to increase revenue, but also medium and small provincial clubs. It felt like the right moment to focus on this often overlooked architectural typology: universally known, apparently standard, yet with a history rich in evolutions, variants, and adaptations.

“Here, architecture is a key to talk about the city and society. Star players are myths, of course, but myth also settles into forms and uses: a portico, a curva, a patch of shade where people gather. A stadium carries memories and symbols that exceed function. It is a civic theater: a place of exaltation and disappointment, of allegiance and conflict, of foundational moments for a community. There’s an obvious analogy; I’m thinking of nineteenth-century Italian opera houses: they were popular, not just for the well-to-do. There was a gallery, there were ordinary people. The works of Verdi, Rossini, Donizetti staged comedy and tragedy, tears and laughter, pride and melancholy. The music could stir deep emotions. Something similar happens in stadiums: it’s a theater of mass society, tied to sporting events yet fueled by the same emotions—joy, sadness, despair, and at times violence or protest. Today you see flags for different causes: from Palestine to campaigns against violence toward women, all the way to national political issues.

“Architecture tells all of this—because it shapes and, at the same time, narrates the way we live sport and the city. An honest cultural project—an exhibition, a book, a reportage—restores this complexity: it brings out stories, layers, contradictions, beauty, and problems. And it allows us to understand that a stadium is never just a building.”

Moira Valeri: “I am an architect and researcher; I taught for years at a university in Istanbul, and it was there that the idea for this research was born. Talking with Fabio, who suggested the topic of stadiums for a master’s course I was teaching at Yeditepe University, I began working on it for a couple of semesters. Back in Italy, we caught Manuel’s interest. In the meantime, the project had already expanded, with an international focus as well as on Italian stadiums. That’s how we ended up signing on as curators for MAXXI.

As the first Italian exhibition specifically on stadiums, we chose a path capable of narrating their transformations across time and space, at different latitudes. In Europe there have been very few previous exhibitions dedicated solely to stadiums, unlike those on football and sport more broadly.

The exhibition traces the transformation of stadiums from their Greco-Roman forerunners to the present day, passing through the nineteenth-century turning point, when modern sport was born after an almost fifteen-century ‘void’ during which stadiums were essentially not built. The role of certain inventions of the era was decisive as well, such as the use of artificial lighting; the arrival of radio in the stadium world in 1927 and, ten years later, of television. The season of stadium disasters, the safety issues that emerged especially in the 1980s, and the subsequent Taylor Report of 1990 mark the beginning of a phase of massive upgrades and investments, with stadiums evolving to become instruments of city branding: cities compete through their facilities, and increasingly architects are brought in, recognizing architecture’s ability and power to drive growth and innovation. Reaching the contemporary moment, we see venues that are truly transformable machines: sliding stands, lifting pitches, retractable roofs, platforms reconfigured to host not only football but concerts and events, too. A place that becomes a cultural stage.”

Fabio Salomoni: “I have also lived and worked in Turkey for many years; I’m a sociologist and teach at Koç University in Istanbul. I’m interested in collective memories and their relationship with space. But I spent a significant part of my youth on stadium terraces and, between the 1980s and 1990s, I was part of the first research group on football cultures in Italy.

For a long time I drifted away from stadiums, only to return years later almost by chance: a few years ago a colleague took me to an abandoned stadium in Brno, in the Czech Republic. It was love at first sight: thousands of volunteers had worked to reopen it solely to allow a local star to play his farewell match, in front of thirty thousand people, and then close it again. That’s when I realized it was time to pull an object considered obvious out of invisibility and shine a spotlight on it.

Specifically, I worked on the ‘anthropological islands’ within the exhibition: five thematic spaces that look at the relationships between stadium and people, stadium and city, the emotions that play out inside, and the transformations of recent decades. Thanks to photographs and archival materials, we managed to highlight an entire emotional spectrum: joy, fear, excitement, disappointment, hope. Remembering that even the expression of these emotions is not ‘natural’: it is culturally determined and changes over time, as we observe how the stadium fully enters this culture, as in music, cinema, literature, and poetry.

We also highlighted the political ambivalence of the stadium, which has been both a stage for regimes and a place where citizens voice political messages—sometimes the only visible space in authoritarian contexts; in democracies, one of the platforms where radical demands emerge. Today there’s a tendency to erase this ambivalence: football as pure game, the stadium as pure container. It isn’t so. ‘Negative’ emotions, symbolic conflict, and political appropriation are part of the stadium’s essence. Of course, the emphasis on safety tends to stifle these elements, but it cannot eliminate them.

Our aim was to show that a stadium is not just an engineering work: it is a place of memory for which people fight—either to save it from demolition or to rebuild it—and to which they are attached for many different reasons. Times change, bodies change, controls change, objects change, but the arena remains a machine of meanings that exceeds architecture.”