Our lobby gallery is open to visitors on weekdays, 10AM-4PM. (Italian Academy: 1161 Amsterdam Avenue, south of 118th Street; buzz for entry.)
With evocative video and brilliant photographs, this show traces the five decades of discovery and research since a chance discovery in a Sardinian field in 1974.
A farmer’s plow turned up a gigantic stone head, and thousands of shattered limestone pieces were then found. The fragments have since been reassembled into dozens of colossal statues. These figures—and the monumental funerary site where they were discovered—make Mont’e Prama a uniquely rich representation of a Mediterranean culture’s values and traditions in the Bronze Age and in the Iron Age.
The statues, known as the Giants of Mont’e Prama, are among the most important archaeological discoveries of the past fifty years. They are stunning for their size and beauty, and they have no equal: they are the only known examples of stone statuary from this period in Sardinia.
This exhibition details a few of the 29 reassembled human figures of Mont’e Prama, and offers a glimpse of the excavation and restoration of these treasures.
To learn more, see the list of experts who spoke at the Italian Academy's symposium in March 2025: 50 Years Since the Discoveries at Mont’e Prama: Sardinia’s 3000-Year-Old Culture.
Co-sponsors: The Autonomous Region of Sardinia; the Mont’e Prama Foundation
This initiative is part of the Italian Academy's Sardinia Cultural Heritage Project which includes books from Columbia University Press, conferences, and digital and gallery exhibitions. The Academy also was instrumental in the major loan of a statue from Mont’e Prama to New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2023.
This project is under the umbrella of the Academy’s International Observatory for Cultural Heritage.
