Art in the Buenos Aires Subway

By Bob Mondello

Published July 30, 2003 at 12:00 AM EDT

Tile art in the Buenos Aires "Subte" subway.

Old World artisans created the tilework that lines the stops of the subway in Buenos Aires, and many of the details on the trains themselves. NPR's Bob Mondello sends us this audio postcard from the Argentine capital.

"The subways of Buenos Aires are beautiful in a style not found much in the U.S. any more," Mondello says.

"Back near the turn of the last century, it was old-world artisans, most of them from Italy, who created the ornate tilework for stations where passengers started boarding trains just months after New York’s first subway line opened."

Bob Mondello

Bob Mondello, who jokes that he was a jinx at the beginning of his critical career — hired to write for every small paper that ever folded in Washington, just as it was about to collapse — saw that jinx broken in 1984 when he came to NPR.

See stories by Bob Mondello

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