Simple Lines

Terminus anxiety, what subway system doesn't bring it on. It's all very well knowing what stop you want to get off at, it's the ends of the lines that matter when you're havering like an idiot between Villejuif and Clignancourt or Upminster and Ealing Broadway at the head of an escalator in the middle of a busy crowd that knows exactly where it's going. 

Milan is more dork-friendly, because there are only three lines, and (because metro lines everywhere like to divvy up when they get out into the suburbs) only half a dozen names to remember. No confusing line names and numbers to remember, either. It's Red Green and Yellow, and the stations are color coordinated to the extreme. 

As you can see, it's reasonably obvious when you're going out of Green Line territory into the realm of the Red; light fittings, handrails, and pipework all change colour, as do the trains themselves. 

This is the red line. There's a man who plays the violin, to an orchestration coming out of his back-pack.

Italians like to think their trains are dirty; some of them are, but not the ones on the Yellow line.
It's all very open-plan.
Sitting here, thinking of the grubby Bart trains running around San Francisco, you can't help but reflect on
Italy's distorted lack of confidence in their own place in the world. It doesn't help when gullible twits like Renzi spend three seconds in Google's ping-pong playpen in Mountain View, and then whinge about how backwards the Italian workplace is, as if everyone in the US simply lurves their boss and their space-age office. Yeah right.