After spending a few weeks in French villages and small towns, it was a bit of a shock to be in a big city again. Lyon and its suburbs are the second-largest urban area in France, with about 2 million people. That meant we were back in a land of traffic, skyscrapers, and hordes of harried commuters in the train station.
Our shock didn’t lessen when we reached the apartment of the couple who were hosting us for three nights (members of an international gay and lesbian hospitality association that we belong to). They live on the sixth floor of an old building with no elevator. We’ve done alpine hikes that were less taxing than carrying our backpacks up six flights of a twisting staircase!
But cities have their upside, too, such as big museums, a wide variety of dining options, and tourist offices that give tours in English. We enjoyed all of those things during our stay in Lyon.
Gallo-Roman Museum: Lyon was founded by the Romans and was the capital of Roman Gaul. We’ve seen Roman artifacts in every country we’ve visited this year, however, so we’re a bit jaded. That nearly made us skip Lyon’s Gallo-Roman museum. I mean, we’ve been to Rome; how good could this be? The answer is awesome.
This is by far the best Roman-era museum we’ve encountered outside Italy. Besides two well-preserved Roman theaters, it has spectacular mosaics and statues and objects from daily life (cups, jewelry, surgical implements, game pieces), all of which were discovered in the area. Plus, the collection is really well displayed and lit (no dusty old cases in this museum). We made a mistake in coming here at the last hour of our last day in Lyon. We would have liked to spend much longer.
Textile Museum: OK, not everyone is as goofy about old clothing and fabrics as Chris is, but this museum is really nice. It has a collection of glorious Persian and Turkish-style rugs, which are hung on the walls of a big room and beautifully lit with spotlights. The colors and patterns just leap out. You see so many insipid modern reproductions of Oriental rugs that you forget how amazing an old genuine one can look. There are also woven and embroidered fabrics dating back to the 6th century, from Egypt and Persia. How can something so fragile have traveled that far and lasted that long?
The Renaissance period is represented by sumptuous fabrics from Italy, such as intricate cut velvet with gold brocade and richly embroidered silks. Lyon was famous for silk weaving from the 17th to 19th centuries (at its peak, 40 percent of the city’s workers were silk weavers). Lots of the silk fabrics that you see on walls, beds, and chairs in palaces such as Versailles were woven in Lyon.
Soierie Saint-Georges: There are only a few silk weavers working in Lyon today, but thanks to a tourist office tour, we got to visit the workshop of one of them. Ludovic de la Calle weaves silk fabrics by hand on several reconditioned 19th-century looms. When we were there, he was working on an order for a Japanese customer (perhaps a rich businessman or a member of the imperial family?), a red striped fabric that costs more than 1,000 euros per meter. On a good day, without too many interruptions, he can weave maybe 20 centimeters. His shop is full of gorgeous scarves and shawls in the hundreds-of-euros range that we would have dearly loved to buy. Oh, to be rich . . .
Traboules: When the Romans came to Lyon, they settled on top of a hill next to the Saone River. In the Middle Ages, with the hill occupied, the only place for the city to develop was on the narrow strip of land between the base of the hill and the river. As a result, the old town (Vieux Lyon) is long and narrow, only two or three streets wide. Getting from one of those streets to another would have meant either walking down long blocks to a cross-street or having frequent side streets. But when room to build is at a premium, side streets are a waste of vertical space if there’s nothing on top of them.
To maximize space and save travel time, the residents of medieval Lyon developed shortcuts called traboules. They are covered passageways that run through the ground floor of a building, to a courtyard, and then through another building (and maybe another courtyard) to connect the long parallel streets. The tourist office gives walking tours of some of the most interesting traboules. They and the courtyards they pass though are a hidden world you never glimpse from the street.
Churches: The Cathedral of St. Jean in Vieux Lyon is a nice enough old church, but it houses a truly amazing clock. This timepiece, three times the height of a person, was built in the 1300s and restored in 1660. The upper face of the clock shows the hour and minute, the month and date, the zodiac sign in ascendance, and the current phase of the moon. The top of the clock has little carved figures that pop out of doors and move around when the clock strikes certain hours.
But it’s the lower face that may be the most remarkable. It’s a calendar that shows the dates of major religious holidays and saints’ days for the current year. The creators of the clock plotted out those days for every year from the 1300s to the mid-2000s(!), one sheet for each year. At the beginning of the year, you just open the clock face and put in the next sheet. Those original sheets are still in use and are completely accurate. Later this century, though, someone is going to have to make an updated set. Sounds like a good job for a monk.
Food: Lyon is supposed to be one of the gastronomic capitals of France, but we had mixed experiences here. Our kind hosts, Laurent and Eric, took us out for dinner with a few of their friends at one of Lyon’s traditional small bistros, called bouchons. The food wasn’t fabulous, but the atmosphere was cozy and the conversation was fun. At the other end of the size scale, we had a good dinner at a Lyon fixture called Brasserie Georges, an immense Art Deco space with about a million tables and an army of old-school waiters zipping around them. The cheesy onion soup was especially yummy.
Oddly enough, though, our best meal in Lyon wasn’t French at all. It was Syrian, at a little place called Alyssaar. We got there as soon as it opened for dinner, which was a good thing, because half an hour later the restaurant was packed. The hummus and the cherry beef, especially, were to die for. I guess the Lyonnais really do know a thing or two about food.
