More than 150 works, sixteen centuries, from the Mediterranean to Asia. In the Podium of Fondazione Prada, Salvatore Settis and Rem Koolhaas tell the story of an ancient world that was already global. From 5 November 2026.

There are exhibitions you visit, and exhibitions that change the question you walked in with. “Global Antiquity” is the second kind.

The question sounds simple: what did “global” mean before globalisation? In the Podium of Fondazione Prada, Salvatore Settis, Anna Anguissola and Chiara Ballestrazzi answer with more than 150 artefacts and works of art spanning sixteen centuries, from the Mediterranean to Asia. The exhibition design is by Rem Koolhaas and AMO/OMA. You leave with the feeling of having seen not the past, but a possible map of the future.

Exhibition view of “Global Antiquity”, Fondazione Prada, Milan. In the foreground: Votive Relief in the Form of an Aedicula with the Palmyrene Gods Malakbêl and Aglibôl, 235–236 CE, Musei Capitolini, Galleria Lapidaria, Rome. Photo: Roberto Marossi. Courtesy: Fondazione Prada

At the preview, Settis speaks the way great scholars do: with precision, and with a passion he makes no effort to hide. His, he says, is not an archaeology of mysteries but an archaeology of light. Artefacts must be made to speak, and with them the people who made, used, reused and forgot them. It is a generous idea of knowledge: every thing is a witness, and the scholar’s task is to listen.

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Left: Indian statuette, Pompeii, 1st century AD, ivory, Museo archeologico nazionale di Napoli (MANN). Courtesy Ministero della Cultura – Museo archeologico nazionale di Napoli. Photo: Giorgio Albano. Right: Casket with figurative inlays, Belmonte Piceno, 560–540 BC, ivory and amber, Museo Archeologico Nazionale delle Marche, Ancona. Superintendence for Archaeology, Fine Arts and Landscape for the provinces of Ascoli Piceno, Fermo and Macerata. Photo: Joachim Weidig (University of Freiburg)

Then Settis picks up an artefact and everything becomes concrete. It is a female ivory statuette that travelled from India to Pompeii before Vesuvius buried the city. It would be easy to turn it into an enigma, a thriller with aliens and secret passages. Settis does something more beautiful: he reasons. If there is one in Pompeii, there were others, lost or still underground somewhere in the Empire. A single artefact becomes the proof of an entire world. It is the method of Carlo Ginzburg, who died in June and to whom Settis pays an affectionate tribute. Micro-histories, placed side by side, become a macro-history.

Exhibition view of “Global Antiquity”, Fondazione Prada, Milan. From left to right: Oil Lamp, 1st century CE, Parco Archeologico di Pompei; Statuette Depicting a Female Figure, c. 1st century CE, MANN – Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli; Jug, 1st century CE, Parco Archeologico di Pompei; Statuette Depicting an Actor, c. 1st century CE, Parco Archeologico di Pompei. Photo: Roberto Marossi. Courtesy: Fondazione Prada

And the macro-history is visible. OMA has drawn it as a large diagram: a web of lines following the journeys of the artefacts, a kind of nervous system of the ancient world. You stand in front of it for a long time.

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Exhibition views of “Global Antiquity”, Fondazione Prada, Milan. Left, in the foreground: Plate with the Sacrifice of Iphigenia, early 3rd century CE, Wyvern Collection, London; Vessel (Kalathos), c. 270–285 CE, The Al Thani Collection. Right, in the foreground: Bowl and Mirror, c. 150–200 CE; Standing Figure Wearing a Cuirass and Cloak, 1st century CE, Dar al-Athar al-Islamiyyah, The al-Sabah Collection, Kuwait City; in the background, the replica of the Xi’an Stele, Musei Vaticani, and the Stele in Honor of the General Kallimachos, Museo Egizio, Turin. Photo: Roberto Marossi. Courtesy: Fondazione Prada

Of all the stories, the one that stays with you is a Buddha recently found at Berenike, on the Egyptian coast of the Red Sea. It is made of Greek marble, it was found in Egypt, and it may have been commissioned by an Indian patron. What is its nationality? The answer is the thesis of the exhibition itself: all of them, together. In an age that uses the word “identity” as a wall, it is a work that is almost tender, and deeply thought-provoking.

Exhibition view of “Global Antiquity”, Fondazione Prada, Milan. From left to right: Stele Dedicated to a Falcon God, c. 100–200 CE, Ismailia Museum of Antiquities; Statue of Buddha, 100–140 CE, Suez Canal Museum, Ismailia; Bilingual Greek-Palmyrene Dedication to the Syrian God Yarhibol, c. 183–212 CE, Suez Canal Museum, Ismailia. Photo: Roberto Marossi. Courtesy: Fondazione Prada

At the theoretical heart of the exhibition is a distinction that, once grasped, is never forgotten. On one side, today’s globalisation: fast, vertical, driven by a few centres of power, by finance, by wars over energy. On the other, ancient globality: slow, horizontal, reciprocal. No one commands; everyone exchanges something.

Édouard Glissant comes to mind, who set mondialité against mondialisation and dreamt of an “archipelago thinking”: different islands that the sea unites rather than divides. “Global Antiquity” is that archipelago, built with real works and artefacts.

Exhibition view of “Global Antiquity”, Fondazione Prada, Milan. In the foreground, from left to right: Heracles, late 2nd–1st century BCE, Villa Adriana e Villa d’Este – VILLÆ (MiC), Tivoli; Statuette Depicting Heracles-Melqart, early 5th century BCE, Museo di Scultura Antica Giovanni Barracco, Rome; Vajrapāṇi and Other Attendant Figures, 2nd–3rd century CE, British Museum, London. Photo: Roberto Marossi. Courtesy: Fondazione Prada

Most surprising of all is hearing Koolhaas take the same side. He says that his office, too, practises globality within a world of globalisation, and that it is difficult, because the first is made of nuances while the second arrives with a hammer. Coming from the architect who, more than anyone, has described the global city, it sounds like a small confession.

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Left: Seated Buddha in meditation, Pakistan, 2nd–3rd century AD, schist. Courtesy MUCIV – Museo delle Civiltà, Rome. Right: Heracles, Roman villa, Galli (Tivoli), late 2nd–1st century BC, Greek insular white marble, Istituto Villa Adriana and Villa d’Este. Courtesy Istituto autonomo Villa Adriana and Villa d’Este-VILLÆ, Tivoli (Ministero della Cultura). Photo: Quirino Berti

His exhibition design is an act of intelligence. Tiny artefacts and monumental works, from all over the world: the risk, he says with irony, was a bric-à-brac shop. Instead he chose a grammar. Five lines, five families of works in conversation with one another, and along these lines you read convergences, symmetries and intersections. The Begram treasure, where Rome, Han China and India arrive in the same place. A coin of Alexander and a Persian cameo that, five centuries apart, repeat the same gesture of power. A golden Scythian gorytos that tells the story of Achilles through the hands of a Greek goldsmith.

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Exhibition views of “Global Antiquity”, Fondazione Prada, Milan. Left: Standing Buddha, 2nd century CE, MUCIV – Museo delle Civiltà, Rome; Allegory of Life, known as the “Parable of the Unicorn”, mid-13th century, Museo della Cattedrale, Ferrara; Icon of Saints Barlaam and Josaphat, 1799, Byzantine and Christian Museum, Athens. Right: The Goddess Tyche as the Personification of the City of Corinth, late 1st century CE, Archaeological Museum of Ancient Corinth; Tabula Chigi, late 1st century BCE–1st century CE, Museo Nazionale Romano, Palazzo Massimo, Rome; Relief Fragment Depicting the City Goddess and a Guardian, 1st century CE, MUCIV – Museo delle Civiltà, Rome. Photo: Roberto Marossi. Courtesy: Fondazione Prada

Exhibition view of “Global Antiquity”, Fondazione Prada, Milan. From left to right: Coin Depicting Alexander the Great and the Indian King Porus, late 4th century BCE, British Museum, London; Cameo Depicting the Capture of the Roman Emperor Valerian by the Persian King Shāpūr I, after 260 CE, BnF – Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris. Photo: Roberto Marossi. Courtesy: Fondazione Prada

And then the light, the most radical choice. By museum rules, an exhibition like this would sit in darkness. Koolhaas wanted natural light, so that the works might return to the light of the world in which they were born. And so Settis’s archaeology of light stops being a metaphor and becomes architecture.

Exhibition view of “Global Antiquity”, Fondazione Prada, Milan. From right to left, among the works: Helios-Mithras Shaking Hands with King Antiochus I, 1st century BCE, Gaziantep Archaeology Museum; Altar Dedicated to Sol Invictus, 190–220 CE, Landesmuseum Württemberg, Stuttgart; Mithras Slaying the Bull, late 3rd century CE, Museo Nazionale Romano, Rome; Toilet Tray with a Nereid Riding a Sea Monster, MUCIV – Museo delle Civiltà, Rome; Heracles, Villa Adriana e Villa d’Este – VILLÆ (MiC), Tivoli. Photo: Roberto Marossi. Courtesy: Fondazione Prada

For anyone who works with images, the Podium raises a very current question. An artificial intelligence model is, in the end, a Begram treasure: a place where images from every era and culture converge. But what kind of convergence is it? The horizontal, reciprocal one of the ancient world, or the vertical, uniform one of the modern world? It is the question “Global Antiquity” hands, perhaps without meaning to, to everyone who makes images today.

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Exhibition views of “Global Antiquity”, Fondazione Prada, Milan. Left: Tomb Guardian Creature (Zhenmushou), Tang dynasty (618–907 CE), MAO Museo d’Arte Orientale, Turin; Cast of the Head of the Lion of Saint Mark, 1892, Fondazione Musei Civici, on deposit at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Venezia. Right: Robe decorated with pearl roundels with dragons and plant motifs, late Sasanian or Sui period, 6th–7th century CE, Museum of Islamic Art, Qatar Museums, Doha. Photo: Roberto Marossi. Courtesy: Fondazione Prada

At the end, Settis leaves a sentence that seems written for this moment in history. We should be proud of our hybridity.

It is hard to imagine a more urgent message, or a more beautiful one.

Global Antiquity — Fondazione Prada, Podium, Largo Isarco 2, Milan. From 5 November 2026.

Exhibition views: Roberto Marossi, Courtesy Fondazione Prada. Artwork images: credits as indicated in the captions.

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