Saint Louis: the arch on the Mississippi

The Gateway Arch, a stainless steel structure 192 meters tall designed by Eero Saarinen and completed in 1965, remains the tallest arch in the world and can be ascended to the top via a small tram cabin.

The Forest Park, larger than Central Park in New York, hosted the 1904 World's Fair and still preserves within its grounds an art museum, a zoo and a science museum, all with free admission.

The City Museum, housed in a former shoe factory, transforms recovered building materials—spiral staircases, airplanes, cisterns—into a vertical playground designed for both adults and children.

The Cathedral Basilica of Saint Louis houses over seven thousand square meters of mosaics, the largest collection in the Western Hemisphere, created over almost eighty years by different artisans.

The Gateway Arch, conceived as a monument to westward expansion, and the City Museum, born from a converted former factory, together tell of a city that always knew how to transform industry into symbol.

The mosaics of the Cathedral Basilica, created over eighty years, remind us instead that not everything in Saint Louis was meant to be immediate or spectacular.