The feat of the airship that flew over the North Pole for the first time
One hundred years is not just an anniversary: it is a distance. And, looking at the Arctic today, also a measure of what we have lost. The Roman stage of Prada's Sea Beyond.
In 1926, Umberto Nobile flew over the North Pole on board the airship Norge, crossing a territory that then represented the last frontier of exploration. A century later, that same space has become a fragile archive, where the ice recedes and memory melts with it. A cry of alarm heard by Prada with the Sea Beyond project, launched in 2019 together with the UNESCO Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission. Where luxury stops being just aesthetics and becomes a narrative device: a way to reconnect man with what he has stopped really looking at, the ocean.
The last stage of this journey takes the form of a double movement, almost cinematic.
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On the one hand, the centenary of Umberto Nobile's feat, the airship Norge that flew over the North Pole for the first time in 1926. On the other, the contemporary gaze of photographer and climate artist Enzo Barracco, who returns to the same territories one hundred years later, documenting their metamorphosis. In between, an implicit question: what remains of the idea of exploration when the explored territory is disappearing?
Rome, in this sense, is not a random choice. It is a symbolic starting point - the Norge left from Ciampino - but also a place of cultural sedimentation, where memory can be staged without becoming a museum of itself. In fact, the two-day event organised together with the National Research Council and the Air Force builds a wider device: conferences, digitised archives, public talks. An ecosystem, more than an event.
It starts on Monday 13 April with the study day 'Umberto Nobile: memories of air and fire' at the CNR headquarters, a scientific conference organised by the CNR in collaboration with the Italian Air Force during which the integrated documentary platform dedicated to the archives of Umberto Nobile, finally digitised, will be presented. Also on 13 April, at 17:30, the photographic exhibition Due sguardi sull'arctic a confronto curated by Enzo Barracco will be inaugurated at the Museo Storico dell'Aeronautica Militare in Vigna di Valle, Rome, and will remain open to the public until 31 May 2026. Here, black-and-white archive shots of Nobile's expedition dialogue with images taken by Barracco in 2025 between Alaska and the Arctic Circle. It is not a nostalgic or celebratory confrontation: it is a visual, almost violent gap between the epic of conquest and the fragility of the present. Barracco photographs ice that is no longer eternal, ecosystems that oscillate between resistance and dissolution. And he does so with an aesthetic that does not indulge in catastrophism, but builds an emotional relationship, free of didactic drifts.
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