Milan's Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II gave Prada its first address in 1913. In September the house takes the whole corner: two stores facing each other under the dome, a pastry salon, a photography space and a passage dug beneath the mosaic floor.
The announcement came from Milan on 22 June. Prada Galleria is a multi-floor project at the centre of the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, built around the site where the Fratelli Prada shop opened in 1913. It gathers the women's and men's stores, the pastry house Marchesi 1824, the Osservatorio Fondazione Prada, a private client salon and an exhibition on the history and future of the brand. The whole opens to the public in September 2026.
Stand under the glass dome and the geography is simple. Prada Donna faces Prada Uomo across the octagon, one on each side of the arcade. The project claims every level above the men's store and enlarges the women's boutique. A new underground passage will link the two, so a customer can cross the Galleria without stepping onto the mosaics.
The plan
The house has published the outline and kept the details for September. There will be new sales space on a flexible plan, rooms for events, and quarters for the Prada Group itself. The exhibition promises the archive: a century of leather goods, nylon, collections and ideas, laid out a few metres from the counter where the first trunks were sold.
The vertical arrangement is the interesting part. Retail sits at arcade level, as it has for a hundred and thirteen years. Above it come the salon, the pastry room and the galleries, stacked toward the roof. The building becomes a section drawing of the company, from shopfront to foundation.
Every fashion house claims a spiritual home. Prada is the rare one whose address never changed.
The Splendid EditAbove the arcade
Two of the tenants are already familiar to Milanese. Marchesi 1824, the pastry house founded two centuries ago and part of the group since 2014, keeps a green-velvet salon above the men's store, where the panettone comes wrapped and the espresso arrives on silver. The Osservatorio, Fondazione Prada's space for photography and visual languages, has occupied the levels beside the dome since 2016. Visitors ride a lift from the arcade and come out level with the glass.
Courtesy of Prada — The octagon of the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II from above
The new pieces are the private client salon, the exhibition floors and the passage below ground. Together they turn a pair of shops into a single vertical address. The house calls it an effort to bring new energy to Milan's historic centre. It reads equally as a statement about where Prada believes its centre of gravity sits.
First address
The arcade itself predates the shop by half a century. Giuseppe Mengoni raised the Galleria between 1865 and 1877, a cross of glass and iron linking the Duomo to La Scala, and Milan has treated it as the city's drawing room ever since. Its floor mosaics get walked flat by tourists, its lunettes hold the allegories of four continents, and its arcades hold the oldest names in Italian commerce. A lease under the dome is the closest thing retail has to a title deed.
Mario Prada and his brother opened Fratelli Prada in the Galleria in 1913, selling trunks, dressing cases and objects for travel. The shop earned a royal warrant and a clientele that arrived by steamer and sleeping car. Miuccia Prada took over the family business in 1978 and built the rest on top of it. The company that now owns Miu Miu, Church's and Versace still keeps its first shop trading under the same arches.
The house has paid its rent on the monument before. A decade ago Prada funded the restoration of the Galleria's facades together with Versace, with a contribution from Feltrinelli, under the direction of the city. The cleaning revealed Giuseppe Mengoni's original two-colour surfaces, hidden under a century of soot. That Versace now sits inside the same group gives the octagon a quiet symmetry: the two names that restored the arcade face each other across its floor.
September
The timing lands well. September in Milan means the return of the fashion calendar, and the city's spring shows this year already argued for Prada as an idea rather than a label; the SS27 menswear outing in June was staged as a case against useless design. A building that stacks the archive above the sales floor makes the same argument in marble and iron.
Milan gets a new landmark inside its oldest shopping arcade, and Prada gets its history and its future on one staircase. The city has watched houses build flagships for decades. This one is different in kind: a company folding its stores, its foundation, its pastry counter and its own headquarters into the building where it began. The doors open in September. The address has not changed since 1913.
The Splendid Edit on Prada Galleria, Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, Milan. Opening to the public September 2026. Details from Prada Group.
Photography courtesy of Prada — Prada Galleria, Milan