François Arago

A line of bronze medallions runs through Paris, set flush into the ground along the Paris Meridian. The Dutch artist Jan Dibbets laid out all 135 of them in 1994. The route stretches nine kilometres from the north of the city to the south, crossing six arrondissements. The work belongs to the land art movement, which sets art directly into the environment.

The installation honours François Arago, a French scientist and politician who studied the meridian and helped shape the metric system. The commission marked the two-hundredth anniversary of his birth. Each medallion measures twelve centimetres across and carries his name beside arrows for north and south. Some sit in symbolic spots, such as the Paris Observatory where Arago worked, while others lie in ordinary settings. Construction work has shifted or removed a number of them over the years. Many survive, and you can still find them near the Louvre and in the Luxembourg Gardens.

Dan Brown's novel The Da Vinci Code calls the line the Rose Line, and the name drew wide attention. Brown's plot is fiction, but the medallions themselves are not. Underfoot, each surviving medallion still points a walker from north to south across Paris.