Red Rover

QT8 is a very strange name for a metro station. You don't get many stations that are abbreviations. You instinctively want to run it together to form words: cutie-eight. And now I'm thinking of when John Gardner introduced an assistant to Major Boothroyd in his Bond novels and nicknamed her Q'ute. Those early Gardner novels were weird. They uncomfortably straddled Ian Fleming seriousness with Roger Moore insanity - I'll just say one breasted woman eaten by giant snakes. If you know, you know.QT8 actually stands for Quartiere Triennale Ottava. It was a district constructed as part of the eighth Milanese Triennial, an art and architecture festival that has run every three years (on and off) for a century. The idea, lead by a planner named Pierre Bottoni, was to build an "ideal" district - a showcase development of the future. They drew ideas from all over the world, particularly the English Garden City movement, and built a district on the edge of the city that was full of greenery,…