More than 150 artworks and artifacts fill the ground floor of the Podium, gathered to trace the ties that linked the Mediterranean to Asia long before anyone spoke of globalisation. The curators describe these links as a polygonal network, far wider than the Silk and Spice Roads we know from school books. Merchants, rulers, pilgrims and armies all left traces in it.
Each part of the show tells a single story of exchange. An Indian ivory statuette found in Pompeii opens the most famous of them, a small figure that crossed an ocean to end up buried under Vesuvius. Nearby stand a South Arabian bronze of a man in cuirass and cloak, a gold gorytos from a Scythian burial mound near Melitopol and a sardonyx cameo of the Persian king Shapur I. Where an object was found often says as much as where it was made, and the display lets both places speak.
Koolhaas, Giulio Margheri and the AMO/OMA team built the displays in metal and fiberglass, arranging them along lines of convergence and intersection that echo the routes of the objects themselves. The project continues the research on antiquity that Fondazione Prada started with Serial Classic and Portable Classic in 2015 and followed with Recycling Beauty in 2022.
Global Antiquity
5 November 2026 to 1 March 2027
Fondazione Prada, Podium
Largo Isarco 2, Milan