Does the world exist? The diversity of materials, objects, and motifs in the Faesch Collection conceals an overarching system of knowledge that follows an archaic principle. Collecting and museum display served in the early modern period to affirm status while also constituting a new research practice. Collections were linked both to sociability and individual self-realisation. They also embodied cosmopolitanism in the form of objects. This carried cultural and geographical implications. For the Faesch family, Italy was, on the one hand, a place associated with youthful wanderlust and, on the other, understood as a life-affirming epicentre of knowledge. An affinity to Italy pervaded Basel’s upper classes. It anchored their identity formation as a specific kind of cosmopolitanism that took the form of a lived bildungsroman, combining tradition, ritual, adventure, and knowledge.