Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Italy’s financial capital Milan is shaping up to be the latest European art hotspot, as galleries join a wave of super wealthy individuals drawn there by an increasingly attractive tax regime.Entering the fray is the international gallery Thaddaeus Ropac, which represents artists such as Antony Gormley and Anselm Kiefer. It opens its seventh permanent gallery later this year – in Milan’s neoclassical Palazzo Belgioioso. “We are so rooted in Europe and Italy was missing,” Ropac says. The Salzburg-founded business also has spaces in London, Paris and Seoul. “Rome might be Italy’s most beautiful city but it doesn’t have the same energy,” he adds. Since Brexit, Milan has upped its appeal to the wealthy, and has even greater pull following the UK government’s plans to scrap the “non-dom” tax regime. Italy has a flat €100,000 annual tax charge on overseas income, recently doubled to €200,000 for new residents but still a tempting prospect for wealthy non-doms. The city “has completely changed in the past 10 years”, says Elena Bonanno di Linguaglossa, a gallery veteran who will become executive director of Ropac’s Milan outpost. “It has become very international.” The forthcoming Winter Olympics, hosted by Milan and Cortina d’Ampezzo in February 2026, is giving the city’s infrastructure a boost, much as the Summer Olympics did for Paris.Bonanno di Linguaglossa notes that the ingredients for Milan to become “the art capital of the future” have been in place for a while. “Italy’s wealth, its hard-working, big industrial families and their [art] collections, have been the engine of Milan for a long time.” Milan’s fashion credentials have proved dominant but its art, she says, is “under the skin” of the city. She cites Leonardo da Vinci, in Milan from the 1480s, and fast-forwards to the early 20th-century artist Lucio Fontana — famous for his slashed canvases — who spent decades in the city. While privately run museums have led the contemporary art showings in recent years, a new public museum for modern and contemporary art — the Palazzo Citterio — opened as part of the new Grande Brera cultural complex last month, a project accelerated by Italy’s hard-right, but seemingly stabilising, government.Meanwhile, other dealers are testing the Milan waters. Ben Brown Fine Arts plans a presence this year. The city has “an active buying community” Brown says, for both contemporary art and for 20th-century Italian art giants such as Fontana and Alighiero Boetti. For these, “people are buying, and selling, at all levels, from a €50,000 work on paper to a €2mn Mappa [by Boetti]”, he says.Last April, Lehmann Maupin opened a pop-up space on the city’s fashionable Via della Spiga shopping street, to coincide with the Venice Biennale, and Milan’s Miart — Italy’s largest art fair. Sales were made between €50,000 and €250,000 during the run, with plenty of Italian and overseas visitors. But not all international galleries have stayed the course. In 2011, London’s Lisson opened its first overseas outpost close to the Milan convent that houses Leonardo’s “The Last Supper”, but shut its doors in 2017. “We were too early, it would have made more sense to open now,” says Lisson chief executive, Alex Logsdail. “The reason we closed was to focus our efforts on opening in New York. Milan was wonderful and artists loved the small space we had, but it was time to change where we put our energy,” he adds.Milan boasts a few homegrown commercial galleries, including Massimo De Carlo and Gió Marconi, which are influential on the international scene. Miart has run since 1996. But Milan’s art community is “still minuscule”, compared to London or New York, Brown says: “There isn’t much room. If 10 galleries open, eight will lose money, unless they keep their overheads low.” Italy is “also quite a bureaucratic country, so it isn’t immediately enticing”, he adds. One advantage, for now, Brown says, is that “there is much less competition than in Paris.”Ropac seems confident to take the plunge. The timing makes sense — 2025 marks the centenary of the birth of Robert Rauschenberg, an artist whose estate Ropac represents and who gets a dedicated showing at Milan’s Museo del Novecento in the spring. For living artists too, the prospects are exciting, Ropac says, adding that his team is scoping out possible studio spaces for some of them. Does he expect other international galleries to follow his lead? “Some of the most active collectors are in the area and now there are the added implications of more international people settling there. We are very optimistic.”Find out about our latest stories first — follow FT Weekend on Instagram and X, and sign up to receive the FT Weekend newsletter every Saturday morning
