The Project
Mission Prometheus proposes to retrace the ideal route on the "Silk Road to China", with departure from Italy (Venice: 2008) and arrival in China (Bejing: 2009). A team of five riders and seven horses will embark on a journey that results from an important and painstaking job of reconstructing history. While not losing sight of the development of the ancient caravan roads, the mission has in any case given preference to the of idea of travel and the spread of scientific and cultural knowledge.
The journey therefore takes shape as a series of connections among the urban centers which had considerable importance during the centuries-old tradition of commercial, cultural and scientific exchange, to which Italy has strongly contributed.
Five experienced riders, prepared to cross the entire distance from Venice to Bejing using the same horses. Seven horses, which will be selected among Italian breeds of great resistance and will be trained and checked by a team of veterinary experts from the University of Perugia.
The team will travel 13,900 km, the entire length of the Silk Road - at each country's border it will be joined by a group of local riders representing each respective nationality, creating a symbolic "relay" of friendship and peace. The project forsees crossing 16 countries and the principal cities of Central and Balkan Europe, the Middle East, and Central Asia until China: the crossing of the Silk Road in all its extensions, completely by land and using the same horses, a project that within living memory nobody has ever achieved.
The expedition is depicted, above all, as a strenuous human undertaking of direct contact with profoundly different peoples, inspired by the ideals of peaceful worldwide living. Mutual knowledge, therefore, is the starting point and an ideal basis for the expedition - a principle that includes the willingness to welcome and adapt as its own reality the goodwill that comes from others. The same willingness displayed by the man who can be considered our inspiration and who, through his trips, contributed greatly to the long history of friendship between Italy and the East: Marco Polo.
With this trip, the Western man reveals himself to be equal, at least in his gestures and in his appearance, to the people that he will meet along the way. This gesture, this action, doesn't represent just any trip, but is the expression of a journey first shaped inside ourselves and only afterwards becomes concrete reality. A non-virtual trip, although achieved using very solid and natural means. Therefore, a trip back in time, but also in the present, which represents contact and direct relationships with profoundly different peoples.
Such an undertaking can also be seen as an attempt to reconcile technology and human values. In the pre-electronic age, the temporal physical horizon moved with the observer, the sources were far or near in the measure that it was physically and psychologically difficult to reach them. In the modern age, the position of man is of a spectator: the effort is digital in both cases and therefore equidistant.
We are not trying to deny the importance of modernity or the advantages of technology, but we seek to emphasize the psychophysical effort needed to reach our horizon, an effort that will be equally approaching the prohibitive. This experience, if appreciated in the right way, can be a powerful creative stimulus for many of those who have abandoned themselves to being spectators.