Rome does not need me to tell you it’s beautiful. Every cracked column, every mossy fountain, every impossibly golden late-afternoon light bouncing off a palazzo wall has already made its case, a thousand times over, in a thousand other people’s photos. It’s the Eternal City. It knows what it is.

What Rome is a little quieter about is its contemporary art scene. It’s there, tucked behind the ruins and the relics, in former stables and quiet piazzas just off the tourist trail. You just have to know where to look. I wrote about a few of my favorite Rome galleries after my last visit a couple of years ago, and this summer, the city has much to offer as well. Three shows in particular are worth building a day (or an evening) around. I promise none of them will make you choose between the Rome you came for and the Rome you didn’t know was there.

Robert Mapplethorpe at the Ara Pacis Museum

Let’s start with the one that feels almost too perfectly Roman to be a coincidence. Robert Mapplethorpe spent his career chasing an ideal of classical beauty through a camera lens: bodies as sculpture, flowers as architecture, everything lit and posed with the precision of someone who’d studied his Greek marbles closely. So of course, someone finally had the good sense to put his work in a museum built around an actual Roman altar.

The Forms of Beauty, on at the Ara Pacis Museum through October 4, brings together more than 200 photographs, including a group never before shown in Rome, tracing Mapplethorpe’s obsession with the body, the still life, and the kind of formal rigor that would have made an ancient sculptor nod in approval. The show is the final stop on a three-city tour that began in Venice and passed through Milan, and this Roman chapter leans into the dialogue with antiquity: there’s a whole section pairing his images with classical statues, and a set of photographs he took in Italy that appear here for the first time. Standing in a room built to house a 2,000-year-old monument to peace, looking at black-and-white photographs of orchids and outstretched limbs is a genuinely strange and wonderful kind of time travel.

Francesca Woodman at Gagosian

A short walk (or a very short taxi ride, if it’s one of those steamy Roman afternoons) from the Ara Pacis, Gagosian’s Rome outpost is hosting something beautiful as well: Lately I Find a Sliver of Mirror Is Simply to Slice an Eyelid, on view through July 31.

Francesca Woodman lived in Rome for two years as a young RISD student in the late 1970s, and it left its mark. This exhibition, nearly fifty lifetime prints, many shown publicly for the first time, traces her fascination with Surrealism, which deepened considerably during her time here, thanks in part to her discovery of the Libreria Maldoror, the bookshop-gallery where she had her first European solo show. Her photographs of herself, mostly, dissolving into crumbling interiors, wrapped in duct tape, draped in eels, half-hidden behind broken mirrors feel like they were always meant to end up back in this city, among all its own beautiful decay. It’s a small show, but it’s the kind you’ll still be thinking about on the flight home.

Valentino’s Venus at PM23

And then there’s the one that has nothing to do with antiquity and everything to do with Rome’s other great obsession: beauty as spectacle. VENUS — Valentino Garavani through the eyes of Joana Vasconcelos is the second exhibition at PM23, the gorgeous new cultural space the Valentino Garavani and Giancarlo Giammetti Foundation opened right off Piazza di Spagna, in Piazza Mignanelli. It was extended through July 19, so if you’re reading this mid-summer, don’t procrastinate.

The Portuguese artist Joana Vasconcelos was given full run of Valentino’s archive and creative universe, and the result is somewhere between a couture retrospective and an art installation you could get genuinely lost in: thirty-three of Valentino’s iconic gowns in dialogue with Vasconcelos’s monumental, maximalist sculptures, all building toward a final room called Garden of Eden where the Valkyrie, Cinderella, and the femme fatale all seem to coexist. The centerpiece, a towering sculptural Valkyrie built from crochet, was made through a genuinely moving participatory project involving fashion students, hospital patients, and women from local shelters, so there’s real heart under all that spectacle.

And when you’ve had enough beauty for one day...

Because even the most devoted art lover needs to come up for air in this city, here are three of my favorite ways to decompress between (or after) gallery-hopping:

Lunch on the terrace at La Rinascente near the Spanish Steps. For a quick, easy midday reset with a view, the terrace at La Rinascente is hard to beat. It’s close enough to Piazza di Spagna (and PM23, conveniently) that you can slot it right into an art-filled afternoon.

Aperitivo and people-watching in Campo de’ Fiori. Grab a spritz, find a spot facing the square, and just watch Rome go by. On a good evening, you’ll get a sexy saxophone player weaving through the crowd with a soulful, slightly off-key rendition of “What a Wonderful World.” Somehow it always works.

Sunset drinks at the Bulgari Hotel rooftop. If you want your view to match the drama of the day’s art, head up to the rooftop bar and take in the sweep over Piazza del Popolo with a long drink in hand. It’s Rome doing its best golden-hour impression, and it rarely disappoints.

Rome will always be the ruin everyone comes to see. But this summer, it’s worth remembering it’s also very much alive, still making things, still surprising people, still finding new ways to be beautiful.