In Los Angeles, memory is never linear. It moves through stratifications, through reflections, through luminous ghosts that continue to live among the palm trees of Hollywood Boulevard, in the corridors of historic hotels and in the restaurants where cinema has learned to tell about itself.
And of all the stories that the city continues to cherish, none are more deeply intertwined with its identity than that of Marilyn Monroe.
Norma Jeane Mortenson was born here in 1926, in a Los Angeles that was still a promise rather than a capital of dreams. His life, made up of abandonments, family homes and sudden accelerations towards celebrity, follows the trajectory of the city itself almost perfectly: fragile, ambitious, capable of transforming insecurity into spectacle and vulnerability into myth.
One hundred years after the birth of the diva who, more than any other, embodied the Hollywood imagination of the twentieth century, Los Angeles invites you to follow an itinerary that is not only tourist, but almost archaeological: a journey to the places where Marilyn Monroe lived, worked, dined, dreamed and, above all, built her own legend with a clarity that is often underestimated.
The Academy Museum and the portrait of Marilyn as the architect of her own myth
The most natural starting point for understanding Marilyn today isAcademy Museum of Motion Picturesthe great temple of cinema inaugurated in 2021 in the heart of Miracle Mile.
The museum opens the exhibition on May 31, 2026 “Marilyn Monroe: Hollywood Icon”an ambitious curatorial project that promises to go beyond the stereotypical image of the “ditzy blonde” to restore the complexity of an artist who, in the midst of the studio system, learned to manipulate her public persona with extraordinary awareness.
The exhibition brings together hundreds of original objects — period photographs, production documents, personal letters, posters, portraits and rarely exhibited materials — offering a surprisingly modern look at Monroe: not just an actress, but builder of imaginationcapable of anticipating an era in which the public identity of stars would become an integral part of their work.
In other words, Marilyn was not just a Hollywood creation. She was also one of the first women to understand how Hollywood really worked.
Hollywood as an immersive story: the new experience dedicated to the diva
In 2026 the city will also celebrate its centenary with “Marilyn: The Immersive Experience”a large multimedia installation that promises to transform the diva’s biography into a sensorial journey.
It is not simply an exhibition: it is a cinematic narrative constructed through immersive environments, never-before-seen photographs, rare footage and personal objects that allow us to navigate the key moments of her life — from the transformation from Norma Jeane to Marilyn Monroe to the sets that consecrated her as a global icon.
Hollywood, which for decades has transformed its image into an infinite sequence of photographs and stills, today returns that same image in a contemporary form, made of light, sound and memory.
Sleeping in 1950s Hollywood: the Roosevelt Hotel
If there is a place where the story of Marilyn Monroe still seems suspended in the air, it isHollywood Roosevelt Hotel.
Overlooking Hollywood Boulevard since 1927, the Roosevelt is one of the most iconic hotels in the city and still retains the atmosphere of an era in which Hollywood was a young, almost improvised industry, but already capable of producing myths destined to last a century.
Marilyn lived here for about two years, just as her modeling career was starting to take shape. It was also the location of his first professional photo shoot, carried out alongside the famous Tropicana Poolthe swimming pool designed by the artist David Hockney which still today represents one of the most photographed spaces in the city.
The hotel also keeps the Marilyn Monroe Suitea bright apartment overlooking the swimming pool that preserves the aesthetics of the 1950s: clean lines, open spaces, a discreet Californian elegance that expresses the atmosphere of classic Hollywood better than any museum.
To sleep here is, in a certain sense, to inhabit the moment when the myth was just beginning to take shape.
The Hollywood Museum and the Transformation Laboratory
To really understand how Marilyn Monroe was born you have to go into Hollywood Museumhoused in the historic laboratory building of Max Factor.
Here is one of the most symbolic places in the history of Hollywood image: the make-up rooms where Norma Jeane Mortenson was transformed into the Marilyn Monroe that the world would come to know.
It’s not just an aesthetic detail. In those rooms a visual language was built that was destined to define the very idea of a film star.
The museum preserves further 10,000 objects linked to the history of cinemaincluding costumes, photographs, cars and personal items of the stars. Among the most famous pieces in the collection dedicated to Marilyn is the legendary million-dollar honeymoon dress, worn when she married Joe DiMaggio and later during her trip to Korea in 1954 to entertain American troops.
It is an object that tells much more than a simple story of glamour: it tells the moment in which the diva became a cultural symbol.
The footprints in the concrete of the TCL Chinese Theatre
In Hollywood there are rituals that function almost like civil ceremonies.
One of the most famous is that of TCL Chinese Theatrewhere movie stars leave hand and foot prints in the concrete of the famous Forecourt of the Stars. Marilyn Monroe attended the ceremony in 1953 along with Jane Russellafter the success of Gentlemen Prefer Blondesthe film that definitively transformed his public image. Even today those footprints attract thousands of visitors every day.
A few steps away is also his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fameto the number 6774 Hollywood Boulevard — a precise point on the map where the myth continues to be photographed, shared and reinterpreted.
Dinner at Musso & Frank Grill, where Hollywood dined with herself
Among the places that best describe the Hollywood of the golden years is the Musso & Frank Grillwhich opened in 1919 and remained surprisingly faithful to its original identity. Entering here means crossing a temporal threshold: dark wood paneling, waiters in red jackets, martinis served with an almost theatrical ritual. It’s the type of restaurant where Hollywood didn’t show itself to the public, but told itself among peers.
In the 1950s, Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio often dined in the Back Roomthe private theater opened in 1934 for the film industry’s elite. Practically everyone has passed through the restaurant tables: Elizabeth Taylor, Steve McQueen, Charlie Chaplin, Humphrey Bogart.
It is one of those places where you understand how Hollywood is not just a film factory, but also a network of relationships, meetings and late-night conversations.
The retro charm of the Formosa Café
Another legendary address is the Formosa Caféopened in the 1930s next to the studios that over time hosted Warner, United Artists and Samuel Goldwyn.
For decades the restaurant was a favorite haunt of stars: the walls were covered with autographed photographs that told almost a century of cinema history.
Marilyn Monroe was part of that constellation of faces along with Elvis Presley, Frank Sinatra, James Dean and Marlon Brando.
After a restoration by 2.4 million dollarsthe restaurant reopened in 2019 maintaining its original character: soft lights, red tables, an aesthetic that seems to have come from a film set.
The Beverly Hills Hotel and the most private Hollywood
If Hollywood Boulevard represents the public side of the myth, the Beverly Hills Hotel instead it tells of its more private dimension.
The famous Pink Palace hosted Marilyn Monroe several times during her career. His last stay dates back to 1960, during the filming of the film Let’s Make Love.
At the time, Marilyn was living in one of the hotel’s bungalows with her husband Arthur Millerwhile his co-star Yves Montand and his wife Simone Signoret, who had just won an Oscar, were staying in the bungalow next door.
During that complicated production, a brief relationship was also born between Monroe and Montand, an episode that fueled Hollywood news for months.
But more than the scandal, the Beverly Hills Hotel tells the story of the diva’s fragile humanity: her private life, often more complex than the legend.
The silence of Westwood Village Memorial Park
The journey to the places of Marilyn Monroe inevitably ends far from the lights of Hollywood Boulevard, in Pierce Brothers Westwood Village Memorial Park. Here the diva rests, in a pink marble crypt in Corridor of Memories.
Some of the great protagonists of twentieth-century American culture are buried around her – Ray Bradbury, Truman Capote, Dean Martin, Natalie Wood – but Marilyn’s presence continues to attract visitors from all over the world.
There is a detail that makes this place particularly moving.
After the death of the diva in 1962, her ex-husband Joe DiMaggio had it delivered six red roses three times a week for twenty years on his grave. A silent gesture that summarizes the strength of the myth better than any film. Because Marilyn Monroe, in Los Angeles, is not just a memory of the past. He is still, in some way, a presence. A light that continues to be reflected in the windows of Hollywood, in the flashes of cameras and in the imagination of a city that, more than any other in the world, has learned to transform fragility into legend.
