Cortona on the Move 2026

Cortona on the Move 2026
Jul 16, 2026 – Nov 1, 2026

Cortona, Italy

Cortona on the Move 2026 returns the international photography festival to the Tuscan hill town from 16 July to 1 November, with a program that places contemporary documentary work at the center of the discussion. Founded in 2011 by the ONTHEMOVE cultural association, the festival has built its reputation on photography that looks closely at a changing world and treats observation as both method and subject.

This year’s edition, titled Beautiful Country, frames Italy as a place of layered identities, contradictions and unfinished stories. Under the artistic direction of Renata Ferri and the festival direction of Veronica Nicolardi, the program takes shape as an inquiry into recent decades of Italian life, using photography to trace landscapes, social shifts and private memories with equal attention. The result is less a fixed portrait than an atlas of fragments, where wonder and disillusionment sit side by side.

More than thirty exhibitions spread across Cortona, including the Fortezza del Girifalco, historic palaces and outdoor spaces, turn the town itself into part of the experience. That setting has long been central to the festival’s identity: a medieval center repurposed each summer as a site for visual debate, where the architecture of the place converses with the images on view. The 2026 program also includes cross-generational dialogues and a major group show, alongside the commissioned project Peninsula, which brings together ten artists reflecting on contemporary landscape and its thresholds.

What keeps Cortona on the Move distinct is its insistence that photography still matters as a public form of thinking. The festival does not present documentary practice as a closed tradition, but as a language still evolving under pressure from politics, memory and representation. Two immersive workshops round out the edition, extending the event beyond exhibition viewing and into direct exchange.

In Cortona, photography continues to function as a way of reading the present: attentive, critical and open to surprise.


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