A hundred yards long, these red and white marble stripes on the floor of the main concourse are like a "yellow brick road," guiding footsteps toward one of the world's most enchanting cities.
Stripes abound across the ages of art and design--from the corrugated fluting of a classical column, to this facade of a medieval church to a contemporary column by the French artist Daniel Buren (see earlier entry). As pattern, it echoes the first crude repetitive furrows cut into the earth by ploughshare and beast; the principle of settlement and taming and recurrence.
I recall, many years ago, on a remote, windmill-dappled plateau in Greece, watching as peasant, mule and rudimentary plow scribed their lumpy, parallel ribbons over the earth the way Adam must have done.
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