MY LIMINAL SPACE IS: THE SUBWAY
Between Stations: Milan’s Subway and the art of In-Between
Richard Sandler, The Eyes of the City: The Veiled Woman, NYC, c. 1984
Every morning, Milan descends underground.
Beneath the city’s elegant buildings and coffee-scented streets lies a fast-paced world of social intersection, a network of tunnels and platforms where time feels elastic and anonymity becomes a sort of freedom. Not fully above nor below, but a space where the city briefly pauses its surface life.
It’s a place where distinctions blur and Milan’s social hierarchies disappear: the young student sits beside the business executive, checking messages, while the tourist analysing their route stands next to the old man holding the day’s newspaper. For a few stops, everyone shares the same air, the same forward shift, the same ten-meter space. What divides the city on the surface — money, language, intent — dissolves as you walk in the decade-old tunnels. To me, the metro gathers the city’s multiplicity and sets it in motion, turning strangers into silent co-travellers in an unspoken array of movement.
Each carriage is a capsule of untold stories. The tired faces that reflect in the dark windows overlap and vanish as the train dashes through graffiti-covered tunnels, creating a moving collage of identities. We are all strangers flickering in and out of existence like frames in an old film reel. Our backdrop, the tunnel walls, streaked with colour and shadow. Sometimes I would catch my reflection layered between them, half-transparent, as if I too were passing by.
Annie Ernaux, Shinjuku Station, Tokyo
Since my early days of high school, the metro has been a gateway, a portal. Stepping down those cold stairs was a daily ritual to me: leaving the sunlight behind, feeling that familiar change in the air, and entering the glow of the fluorescent tunnels. The footsteps, the soft echo of the incoming train announcement: it all felt strangely comforting, like a rhythm my body already knew. The moment I stepped into the carriage, I knew that for the following twenty minutes, I belonged to no one and nowhere.
The speaker's voice announcing the next stop quickly became a repeating refrain that I would recite in my head as I was shipped through the metro’s stations. “Prossima fermata/Next stop”. It was tattooed in my memory like a bad dream, looping endlessly. I would find myself anticipating it, whispering the stop before the voice could. It was like a mantra for movement and impermanence, on what it means to belong to nowhere and everywhere all at once for a moment.
It was where I learned to observe, like a theatre of tiny dramas unfolding at every stop. The carriages were my stage, and every day the cast changed. A musician playing their violin, a couple arguing in hushed Italian, an old man strolling through carriages asking for money. Sometimes I wonder if others were watching too, or if I was a character in someone else’s scene, unknowingly.
Everyone was both audience and actor, looking without being seen.
Sitting in that train felt like both a physical and psychological transportation device. The moment the doors closed, the city above seemed to dissolve into motion. I stepped into the station at my usual stop, descended into darkness, and emerged minutes later into another world. The air smelled different, the architecture shifted, the entire vibe evolved. Even the people changed, with their new faces, new personalities, new postures. A transition that felt comforting yet disorienting, as if I'd passed through an invisible threshold without noticing. With every stop, the city changed — and so did I.
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The stations themselves carry their own ghosts. From their plain walls covered in old coloured signs to the pale lights that created a futuristic ambience, it all becomes a collage of decades that coexist simultaneously. The scratched glass panels displaying fading month-old ads show evidence of a city that is constantly rewriting itself. The repetition of stops, the screech of the tube reaching the platform, the opening and closing of the heavy doors: everything is repetitive yet ritualized.
Then, there’s that moment: when the train halts suddenly between stations. A short moment of silence that almost seems sacred. The doors open. Conversations pause. For an instant, the illusion of progress stops. Everyone looks up — briefly, but all together. It was a moment of collective awareness, fragile and strange: we were all in transit, all suspended between one thing and the next. The illusion of progress cracked open because, in one way or another, we all live in motion.
When the train starts its rhythm again, the cycle continues, as if nothing ever happened. The carriage exhales, the lights flicker, and discussions resume, slipping everyone back into movement. But I always carried something in these short moments of interruption. It’s a reminder that we all live in that quiet tension between stillness and momentum, learning, often without realising it, that the most revealing parts of the journey happen when everything seems to stand still.
When I finally climbed back up into daylight, something always felt slightly different. Maybe it was the air, maybe it was me. The light above seemed sharper, the sounds louder, as if the city I had left twenty minutes earlier had been magically rearranged. After six years of entering this space, I realised that the metro didn’t just move me across the city, it gave me a moment to drift, to disconnect, but most importantly, to notice.
Honestly, a lot of life happens between stations.
It’s where all the city’s glamour, noise of design and ambition disappear, leaving space for the authenticity of ordinary life.
And maybe that’s the most Milan thing of all, finding beauty in the in-between.
Carlo Corsi (archivio)