Cities like Paris rest on more than laurels

This week boasts a truly beautiful book, outside and in: “Underground Cities: Mapping the Tunnels, Transits and Networks Underneath Our Feet” by Mark Ovenden with illustrations by Robert Brandt (Frances Lincoln Publishing, 224 pp., $40).

“Starting at the International Date Line,” notes the publisher, “take a trail around the world to discover how these 32 cities use their underground spaces.”

Now that would be a trip. It could include the two-story rotating cylindrical vault of gold ingots lying under Wall Street. Or on the other side of the world, the offbeat includes the quarries underneath Paris, mined starting in the 1400s to build the city, and later used by the administration in the 1700s to hide an overflow of dead bodies.

This is a beautiful, informative, lavishly illustrated and powerfully written coffee table celebration of human enterprise, effort and creative ability to capture the imagination.

Introduction: “Walking around most cities in the twenty-first century, people’s feet are highly likely to be falling on top of a lot more than the pavement. If it were possible to neatly peel away the soil, among the worms and moles would be found a messy, yet mesmerizing mix of cable ducts, utility pipes, drainage channels, cellars, crypts, wells, tunnels, subways and foundations of older buildings. In the longer established cities, we are quite literally standing upon the shoulders of giants of civilizations past.”

Execution: They’re here, if a tad battered.

Author Ovenden has captured a dynamite book that weighs in at 3 pounds, 2 ounces, and is loaded with facts, concrete and — clearly — affection for covering things past.

The publisher reports, “Mark Ovenden is a British writer and broadcaster. At the age of seven, he travelled alone ten miles on the London Underground, armed only with a map. He is a Fellow of the Royal Geographic Society.”

Their lesson for us: Pay attention. You never know what might turn up. It may be a jungle out there, but it is also invariably interesting.

Once I was hunting down a story at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City with my adventuresome wife, Lynn, and, barreling through the open stage door ahead of us, we inadvertently marched flat into a short individual bounding back at speed in the opposite direction.

He hit the deck and performed a seamlessly impeccable forward roll on the rug. Thank goodness for that. Because as I helped him up, mercifully intact, he told me who he was:

None other than Mikhail Baryshnikov, the internationally famous performer and — at least to me and Lynn — master of sudden surprise.

I find myself in total agreement with compelling author/ historian/American dreamer Mark Ovenden: “We are quite literally standing upon the shoulders of giants.”

Also, at times, upon their feet.