From
The Sunday Times Travel Magazine
As France’s second city, Lyon tries harder. It has done for 2,000 years, and
it shows.
Here is a place with two world-class rivers, a Renaissance centre to rival
anything in Italy, and a dedication to its stomach remarkable even by French
standards.
At the top of the scale, France’s greatest chef, Paul Bocuse, presides as
culinary pope of a digestion-based religion. He doesn’t half look smug in
the photos – unlike the city itself, which isn’t smug at all, though it
could be.
For millennia, it has gone briskly about banking, commerce and industry –
mainly top-end textiles. And you can read the entire story in the cityscape:
Roman stuff up on top of Fourvière hill; splendid Italianate towers, loggias
and courtyards from the 15th and 16th centuries in Vieux Lyon; and
monumental 19th-century confidence on the Presqu’ile peninsula between the
two rivers.
There’s a Parisian abundance of antiques and fashion shops, museums by the ton
and contemporary life surging through the streets – off to the theatre, to
festivals or to watch Olympique Lyonnais, France’s best football team by a
country mile.
Contemporary architects have been let loose on old buildings (see Jean
Nouvel’s glass hat on the 19th-century opera house) and have given the
skyline a good set of new ones. The St Exupéry TGV station and airport link
looks as if it’s about to take off itself.
By night, lights caress bridges and stately buildings, urging the populace out
to exhibitions, bars, restaurants or just for a wander. Lyon doesn’t come
bedecked with A-list approval. It doesn’t need it. This is a stylish and
substantial European city that knows where it’s come from, and where it’s
going. Get set to go too.
FIRST COURSE
Make your first stop Vieux Lyon, for a dose of the Renaissance. This
quarter, on the banks of the Saône, is a fantastic warren where, from the
16th century, silk-workers wove and Italian bankers looked after the cash.
Loads of it. Enough to put up grand edifices and ochre townhouses with
courtyards, towers, loggias – the full Renaissance panoply. In the 1960s,
city fathers wanted to pull the whole sector down but they decided on
restoration just in time, so the buildings are still there, jammed in tight,
colourful, and looking down like indulgent elders on the scurrying 21st
century. You may still scuttle through their innards via the traboules –
public passages used by silk-workers for faster communication. Just push the
(unmarked) door at, say, 54 Rue St Jean and pad through the intimacy of
history.
Ride the funicular from Old Lyon to the top of Fourvière hill, where
the city started as Roman Lugdunum – there’s a fine amphitheatre up there to
prove it. There’s also, unrelatedly, Notre-Dame basilica: visible from
everywhere in Lyon, it has been described, correctly, as ‘an upside-down
white elephant’. The city promised the church to the Virgin if she’d stop
the invading Prussians reaching Lyon in 1870. She obliged – although, had
she seen the resultant riot of Byzantine mosaics and gilt, she’d doubtless
have waved the invaders on. It must be visited, though, as a useful
indication of just how bonkers French church decor went in the late 19th
century.
Lyon’s big-city buzz grows most intense on the Presqu’ile,
between the Saône and Rhône rivers. The Carré-d’Or, around the Place des
Célestins, concentrates the sort of shops you really don’t want your wife to
find. Or your husband, for that matter – in the dinky Passage de l’Argue
arcade, Brossard sells badger-bristle shaving brushes for £266 a go.
Indeed, thank you for this article. Living or visiting Lyon is a very special experience...
You can get some more information on:
www.onlylyon.org
Séverine Besson-Diaz, Lyon, France
Where else to stay? Sign up on couchsurfing.com and stay with a local for free. There's a massive Couchsurfing community here.
Stephen Kent, Lyon, France
Thankyou for this article. Lyon is a beautiful and interesting city that is well worth more attention than it apparently gets from tourists – according, anyway, to one Lyon taxi driver we spoke to. We went on business, were charmed by the city and stayed on to see more of it.
Penny Phenix, Villiers-Charlemagne, France