P A R I SS O U T E R R A I N Under the streets of a magic city

Like no other place on earth, the Métro in Paris is synonymous with the city. The Métro has been described in novels and poems, sung about in chansons, and served as a background in classic films. The futurist Gino Severini saw the metro as "An illuminated body, travelling through a tunnel that constantly changes between states of darkness and light." Métro stations act as monuments to the Art Nouveau period. More noticeably than anywhere else, the metro serves as the city's nervous and circulatory system. In Kafkaesque unending waves, the groups of people ejected from the trains throb with the vibrancy of the day. The maze of tunnels with junctions, loops, sidings and partially shut stations act like phantoms, allowing whole trains to disappear, helping to elevate the Paris Métro to near mythical status in the 20th Century.

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