Starting from the 27th of March 2026, Palazzo Bonaparte in Rome will host an exceptionally important exhibition: the largest exhibition ever dedicated in Italy to Katsushika Hokusai (1760–1849), the most famous Japanese artist, one of the most powerful and influential figures in universal visual culture.

Hokusai is the great protagonist of the artistic season of the Edo period (1603–1868), the extraordinary era in which the culture of the "Floating World," Ukiyo-e, flourishes, destined to profoundly transform the Japanese and subsequently Western imaginary.

Painter and prolific engraver, visionary and tireless, Hokusai is known worldwide especially for his famous prints Ukiyo-e, in which nature, the movement of water, the landscape, and the figures animating the daily life of Japan are transformed into images of surprising poetic strength and modernity.

The public will move among timeless masterpieces and extraordinary visual inventions: from the Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō to the famous The Great Wave off Kanagawa, from the Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji to the astonishing Manga, the extraordinary albums of drawings that have delivered one of the most famous terms in contemporary visual culture to history.

There are over 200 works on display, coming from the prestigious collection of the National Museum in Krakow, well known in Japan, which exceptionally lends its works to Italy for the first time and, for the first time in the world, presents at Palazzo Bonaparte the first major monographic exhibition on Hokusai outside of Poland.

The exhibition also offers a fascinating interpretation of the master's works: at the center of his images is not only monumental nature, but also the human being. Among the views of Japan and the constant presence of the sacred Mount Fuji, Hokusai observes life with extraordinary sensitivity. Often Fuji recedes into the background, while in the foreground gestures and details of daily life emerge: a hut built by man, the back of a horse along the road, the profile of a roof dialoguing with that of a hill.

Alongside the centrality of man, another great protagonist of Hokusai's work emerges: water.

Not only in the famous Wave, presented here in one of the first prints, but in the infinite variations with which the artist observes, studies, and reinvents it. The water flows impetuously in the series A Journey to the Waterfalls of Various Provinces (Shokoku taki meguri), shatters into whirlpools and sprays, stretches into silent surfaces, or becomes pure visual energy.

In each image, movement arises from an extraordinary precision of line, capable of transforming nature into rhythm and harmony.