One of Uzbekistan’s gold mines is so big it can be seen from space. The country's new national museum may be smaller in size but it has been designed by a star architect to be a landmark building.

This week, ground was broken for the future home of Uzbekistan's cultural treasures, which has been designed by Japanese architect Tadao Ando as a complex of circles and squares connected by triangles.

The foundation stone of the National Museum of Uzbekistan was laid in a ceremony in Tashkent attended by the President of Uzbekistan. Due to open in 2028, it is Ando’s first major project in Central Asia and will be the region’s largest museum space, housing 40,000 square meters of exhibition space plus a national library in a strikingly geometric complex.

Uzbekistan’s art scene is burgeoning. Tashkent has a new Center for Contemporary Art, Samarkand has the Art Station (CCA), and on September 5 the nation's first major international biennial opens in Bukhara, featuring a new commission by Antony Gormley among others.

The number of Egyptian antiquities found in the luggage of "prodigious" smuggler Ashraf Eldarir (52) at JFK in 2020. This week, a Brooklyn judge sentenced him to six months in prison.

Ingres, Canova and Gustav Klimt have enjoyed the artistic ambiance of Antico Caffè Greco, one of Rome’s oldest coffee houses.

Goethe, Keats and Mark Twain were among its clientele and in 1948 a group of intellectuals posed for photographer Irving Penn surrounded by the art on the walls.

The coffee house founded in 1760 has been under a cloud, however, due to a longstanding dispute over a rent rise. Its landlord, the historic Israelite Hospital, and the café's manager, Carlo Pellegrini, have been at loggerheads for the past six years.

Now, the police have been called in because its 300-strong collection of paintings has disappeared from its walls as well as sculptures after the business shuttered. A judge had ruled the works, worth more than $1m, must stay put.

Pellegrini told La Repubblica newspaper the art was moved to a safe space as a precaution because of problems with the Caffè Greco's electrical wiring. He stressed the collection belongs to the café, not its landlord.

The British Museum punches its weight in terms of podcasts, releasing some 200 episodes on subjects ranging across two million years of human history.

Now, celebrity British Museum trustee Mary Beard has launched one of her own with a bang. You could call it museum-adjacent.

The first episode of Instant Classics dropped yesterday and posed the question: which Roman emperor is most like Donald Trump? Beard picked Elagabalus, who suffocated his guests under an avalanche of rose petals, while co-host and arts writer Charlotte Higgins picked Caligula.

It isn’t the first podcast unofficially linked to the British Museum. Its chairman, the ex-politician George Osborne, is an old hand at the microphone and he regularly name-drops the institution in the podcast he co-hosts.

On Political Currency, Osborne has talked about the museum's negotiations with the Greek government over a possible loan of Parthenon sculptures to Athens and why he took a dim view when the then UK prime minister Rishi Sunak declined to meet the Greek Prime Minister over the issue. Osborne could hardly not mention the red-letter day when the French President visited the museum this summer to officially seal the Bayeux Tapestry loan deal.

1 - The under-fire Secretary of the Smithsonian, Lonnie Bunch, was summoned to have lunch with the US President yesterday. The event was described as “productive and cordial" by a White House official.

2 - Esther Schipper now co-represents Lee Bae and will open its first solo show of the Korean artist’s work on September 11 during Berlin Art Week.

3 - Jupiter Artland, the sculpture park outside Edinburgh, is presenting a major work by Tai Shani in the fall and will be opening year-round.