Three marble busts greet visitors at the start of Global Antiquity: Cultural Interactions in Afroeurasian Space 600 BCE–1000 CE, the new ancient trade routes exhibition at Fondazione Prada in Milan. Two may depict Roman men. The third is a meditating Buddha from the Gandhara region of Pakistan. The Roman-style heads frame the Buddha, and one of them wears an “Indian bun” carved above the forehead.
The opening piece, titled “An Impossible Encounter,” sets the exhibition’s terms. The show asks what happens when distant worlds meet, and it answers with objects rather than arguments.
The exhibition runs from November 5, 2026, to March 1, 2027, in the spaces of the Podium. Rem Koolhaas designed the layout with Giulio Margheri and the AMO/OMA team. Curators Salvatore Settis, Anna Anguissola, and Chiara Ballestrazzi assembled more than 150 works from museums and collections across four continents.
For another Milan look at how Fondazione Prada frames cultural memory, see its Fondazione Prada’s Godard studio tribute in Milan and the way it recreates a filmmaker’s working space.
A network, not a single road
Most visitors arrive expecting the Silk Road. The curators argue that the story is larger. According to Finestre sull’Arte, the ancient trade routes exhibition presents a web of exchange that includes economic, political, religious, and artistic ties, moving in several directions at once.
The exhibition includes a female statuette from the Indian subcontinent that reached Pompeii before the eruption of 79 CE. It also displays a Buddha statue found in the temple of Isis at Berenice, in Egypt, which combines Gandhara iconography with techniques linked to Alexandria.
Settis describes the show as “a constellation of exemplary cases.” In his words, each case carries its own form of contact between cultures, yet all of them connect to the same network of trade and influence stretching across Eurasia.
Wine, jewelry and the dead
The migrations section opens with a line from Greek mythology: “escorted by a retinue of satyrs and maenads, Dionysus conquests India.” The exhibition then follows the spread of wine. A pottery rhyton, a conical drinking vessel, comes from an Italian necropolis. Similar cups appear in Greece, Ukraine, Iranian Azerbaijan, and China, many sharing a horn-like shape and an animal form.
Burial objects make the connections personal. Two young women buried in a Roman tomb were laid to rest with ivory dolls and gem-set jewelry in an Eastern style. The designboom report reads this as a sign that the women may have belonged to a Syrian community in second-century Rome. Another woman, buried near Rome, wore an ornamental headband with stones from Southeast Asia and Sri Lanka.
The objects suggest that these women valued far-flung goods enough to take them into the afterlife. The ancient trade routes exhibition treats that choice as evidence of how people in antiquity understood the wider world.
Its materials came from distant regions, linking the Mediterranean, Africa, and the Baltic Sea.
Globality and globalization
The entrance quotes the theorist Édouard Glissant, who separated globality from globalization. In a 2011 conversation with Hans Ulrich Obrist, Glissant described globalization as a force that “standardizes and dilutes.” Globality, by contrast, sees the meeting of cultures as a generative event, often one rooted in antiquity.
The curators adopt this distinction. According to Finestre sull’Arte, they describe globality as a feature of the ancient world. Globalization, in their framing, belongs to the modern system and to economic and political forces operating at world scale.
The ancient trade routes exhibition uses the same idea to question the notion of each culture as a closed fortress.
What the show leaves out
Critics of the framing have a clear point. The designboom report argues that the exhibition gives little space to how wars and conquests also shaped contact between cultures. The curators focus instead on ancient trade. The report notes only a subtle nod to conflict and destruction, through the inclusion of Glissant’s warning.
The show also has gaps it cannot fill. Signs in the galleries say the museum could not borrow a group of objects from Kyiv, Ukraine.
Dates differ across the sources. The exhibition title gives 600 BCE to 1000 CE, a span of 1,600 years. Milano Finanza and Radio Senise Centrale describe the same period as more than 1,600 years or sixteen centuries. The title dates are the most precise and official source for the exhibition.
Visiting the ancient trade routes exhibition
The catalogue for the ancient trade routes exhibition contains 27 essays from Italian and international scholars and entries on the works by more than 40 specialists. Free talks run at the Cinema Godard through February 2027. The first, on November 5 at 19:00, pairs Settis and Koolhaas in a conversation moderated by Stefano Boeri. A free course for teachers, run with the Direzione regionale musei nazionali Lombardia, will take place between November 2026 and May 2027.
The show follows Fondazione Prada’s earlier research into antiquity. Serial Classic and Portable Classic were earlier projects in the same research on ancient art. Recycling Beauty followed in 2022.
The exhibition ends with a question about the present. If each object carries a trace of another place, then no culture stands fully apart. Standing among the busts and the burial jewelry, visitors see that the ancient world was already tangled, and the tangle is the point.
Sources & Links
Frequently asked questions
When and where is the Global Antiquity exhibition on ancient trade routes?
Global Antiquity: Cultural Interactions in Afroeurasian Space 600 BCE–1000 CE runs from November 5, 2026, to March 1, 2027, in the Podium spaces of Fondazione Prada in Milan. It is an exhibition about ancient trade routes.
Who curated the Fondazione Prada ancient trade routes exhibition in Milan?
Curators Salvatore Settis, Anna Anguissola, and Chiara Ballestrazzi assembled more than 150 works from museums and collections across four continents. Rem Koolhaas designed the layout with Giulio Margheri and the AMO/OMA team.
What is the difference between globality and globalization in this exhibition?
Citing the theorist Édouard Glissant, the exhibition describes globalization as a force that standardizes and dilutes cultures. Globality, by contrast, sees the meeting of cultures as a generative event, and the curators treat it as a feature of the ancient world.
What criticism has been made of the Global Antiquity exhibition’s framing?
The designboom report argues that the exhibition gives little space to how wars and conquests also shaped contact between cultures. The curators focus instead on ancient trade, with only a subtle nod to conflict and destruction through Glissant’s warning.
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