The Rome is still falling exhibition presents a nucleus of twenty early works by Robert Smithson, created between 1960 and 1964, many of which are presented to the public for the first time. This selection of works shows an evolution of Smithson's artistic career from the artist's attention to religious and spiritual themes before his trip to Rome in July 1961, up to his experiments with images of popular culture and with mixed techniques.

Robert Smithson (1938-1973) was a self-taught artist, influenced by an interest in science fiction, philosophy, travel, geology, architectural ruins, and popular culture. His production includes pictorial works, drawings, sculptures, films, photographs, writings and Land Art interventions. In 1961, at the age of twenty-three, Smithson arrives in Rome for a personal exhibition of religious-themed works at the George Lester gallery . While in Rome, the artist has the opportunity to delve into the history of the West, especially what he describes as "Byzantine art", the ideas of archetype, myth, and anthropomorphism, and what he defines as the "facade of Catholicism ”. As he wrote in 1972, “I think I have always been interested in the origins and primordials of history, essentially in the archetypal nature of things. These themes haunted me constantly until about 1959-1960, when I then became interested in Catholicism, through TS Eliot and that line of thought. TE Hulme led me to an interest in Byzantine notions of abstraction as a counterpoint to late Renaissance Humanism”.

This period is also marked by what Smithson defines as an artistic and spiritual "time of inner crisis". Rome is still falling takes as its point of reference the exhibition at the George Lester Gallery presenting a nucleus of lesser-known works by the artist, which draw on and at the same time depart from Smithson's religious and experimental ideas during his Roman period. The title of the exhibition derives from a letter that Smithson wrote to his wife Nancy Holt while in the Eternal City in July 1961, in which the four words appear in the lower left corner of the sheet: “Rome is still falling".