On 5 November 2026, Fondazione Prada in Milan opens “Global Antiquity: Cultural Interactions in Afroeurasian Space, 600 BCE–1000 CE”, a research exhibition that treats the ancient world as a dense network rather than a set of isolated civilisations. On view in the Podium through 1 March 2027, the show brings together more than 150 artworks and artifacts whose find-spots matter as much as their places of manufacture.
Curators and design
The project is curated by Salvatore Settis, Anna Anguissola and Chiara Ballestrazzi, with exhibition design by Rem Koolhaas and the AMO/OMA team. Metal and fibreglass displays organise each loan as a short story of convergence, symmetry, intersection or migration — a layout that asks visitors to walk the polygonal routes of ancient trade instead of a single “Silk Road” corridor.
Objects that travel
Among the exhibits that have already drawn attention is an Indian ivory statuette recovered at Pompeii before the eruption of AD 79, and a fourth-century BCE golden plaque from a Scythian tomb near Melitopol, on loan from the National Museum of the History of Ukraine. Such pieces short-circuit the familiar map: Mediterranean forms appear in Asia; Asian materials surface in Italy; Ukrainian gold speaks to Greek workshops.
Settis describes the show as a constellation of microhistories that together sketch a pre-modern globality — unstable, curious, and open. Fondazione Prada presents the project as a continuation of earlier Settis collaborations, from Serial Classic and Portable Classic (2015) to Recycling Beauty (2022).
Why it matters now
In a season crowded with contemporary surveys, “Global Antiquity” insists that questions of hybridity and exchange are not only modern. For Milan audiences — and for anyone following how museums rewrite their timelines — the Podium becomes a laboratory for long-distance connections that still shape how we talk about culture today.