A new exhibition in Milan brings together ancient artefacts and today’s memorabilia to celebrate 3,000 years of sporting history and coincide with the Milano-Cortina 2026 Winter Olympic and Paralympic Games.
Since November 2025 at the Fondazione Luigi Rovati, in Milan’s historic centre, “The Olympic Games. A 3,000-Year History” show is “dedicated to the history, protagonists, and values of athletic competitions, from ancient times to the present day,” the museum’s website says.
Co-produced with the Olympic Museum and Musée cantonal d’archéologie et d’histoire in Lausanne, the curation puts ancient Greek vases alongside virtually-reconstructed Etruscan tombs, and a golden pair of Michael Johnson’s running shoes, telling the story of how sport and sporting values have been passed on through time and place. Notably, the exhibition boasts a world first in the form of the Tomb of the Olympic Games, on its debut public display outside of the Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Tarquinia.
Exhibition curator and Director of Lausanne’s Musée cantonal d’archéologie et d’histoire (MCAH), Lionel Pernet, says the exhibition “shows that all these three big civilisations (Greek, Etruscan and Roman), all brought something and they have something to bring to us, and that the modern time Olympics, they also have heritage, they also bought novelty.”
Anne-Cécile Jaccard, of the Olympic Museum, and another curator of the Milan show, highlights the way it traces the history of diplomacy: “The value is to show to the visitors that, in antiquity, there were international competitions on a Greek level, international competitions that gathered different type of people in an area. And it’s the same thing today, we gather nations in order to have sports competition, but also in order to build a dialogue,” she explains.
From signed relay batons to coins or Hellenistic terracotta feet, frescoes, medals, statues, posters, and Olympic torches, each object chosen for display “must tell a story, because we are a museum of society, and we tell the story of humankind,” Jaccard says, describing the way an athlete “has to be the bearer of a special story, of his own family story, for example, his community or her community, the story of a sports and the story of the world, because when you have the Games, sociopolitical events happened and you can link them to the Olympics.”
The exhibition is taking place at the Fondazione Rovati in Milan, from Wednesdays to Sundays, 10 am until 7 pm, until 22 March 2026. Standard admission is €16.
