At the Palazzo Esposizioni gallery, in Rome, opening today, the exhibition “Sulla Via della Seta. Antichi Sentieri tra Oriente e Occidente” - running until 10 March 2013 - features 151 artefacts from the countries visited by the northern “Silk Roads”: the part that deviates south towards Afghanistan and the Indian Subcontinent (today’s Pakistan and India) has not been focused upon.

The exhibition has been set up by curators from New York’s American Museum of Natural History (Mark Norell, William Honeychurch and Denise Patry Leidy, with Laura Ross), and by a group of European curators (Luca Molà, M. Ludovica Rosati, Alexandra Wetzel, Paola Piacentini, Gabriella Di Flumeri Vatielli), and has a rich catalogue with many pictures and interesting essays. It is published by codice edizioni (Turin, 2012), not too expensive at € 25.

Too bad that two beautiful pictures (pages 48 and 49) only carry in their caption “Library of Congress”. Their author would well have deserved being mentioned: they were shot by Sergey Michaylovich Prokudin-Gorsky, a Russian chemist and photographer, and a pioneer of colour photography in the early 20th century. You can see him in a self-portrait (1912) here below - via Wikipedia.

The four pictures above, shot this morning, are Creative Commons CC BY-NC 2012 by Alessandro Califano.