On the wall of my apartment there is a painting, in bright colours, of an extremely touristic place in Paris. And there is the Sacré-Coeur, and the Maison Rose, and Montmartre. I painted it from a photograph I took in 2011.
You could take it from that, that I like Paris, and I'm not against it.
But if you ask me my favorite city in France, it would be Lyon.
Lyon, at the confluence of the Saône and the Rhône, is a
city with a long history. Founded around 43 BC by Roman governor Munacius
Plancus, who named the new settlement Lugdunum (“hill of light” or “hill of
crows”). Also located on four important roads, it was an ideal site for the capital of Roman Gaul. First the colony was built on Mont Fourvière
(near the modern centre and where you will find the Basilica), and later it
spread towards the rivers.
During the sixteenth century Lyon had its glory days: a city of
60,000 inhabitants, several silk weaving factories, and a crossroads between
France, the Rhine, the Mediterranean countries, and Switzerland.
The beginning of the 19th century saw the growth of the silk weaving industry on the slopes of Croix-Rousse, and in 1831 the ‘Revolte des Canuts’ took place, where the workers revolted against the exploitation by the merchants, who kept lowering the prices they paid for the silk, which the workers (the “canuts”) were forbidden to sell directly to the buyers. It became so serious that the canuts went on strike. The local prefect persuaded the manufacturers to give the workers a minimum wage (it was in his interest after all) but the decision was declared illegal by the government in Paris. Result, the revolt.
In the middle of the same century, Lyon was renovated by a
project (by the) of the prefect-senator Vaisse, mayor of Lyon in the 1850s, who
had many large buildings and new streets built, for example the Palais du
Commerce, the Halles des Cordeliers, the Croix-Rousse hospital, and the Parc de
la Tête D'Or, which nowadays has a zoological garden and an arts centre (the
MAC – Museum of Contemporary Art). In the 1910s Lyon also became the capital of
the French automobile industry.
Lyon nowadays is a thriving economic and gastronomic capital
– I can assure you that I took advantage of the small restaurants, the
‘bouchons’ with their Lyonnaise cuisine. We ate quenelles - a roll made of
minced white meat or fish with breadcrumbs and eggs - and sausages - pork or
veal charcuterie.
The old quarter of Croix-Rousse, a former centre of silk
weaving, remains charming and historic with its traboules – passages between or
through buildings on the ground floor, which allowed direct access for people
going on foot, when the streets were winding. There are even older monuments in
this place – for example the Amphitheatre of Trois Gaules, whose history dates
back twenty centuries and was rediscovered in the 1830s.
But at the same time, it is a modern city, its districts linked by a metro and trams, and with modern architecture especially at the Confluence of the Saône and the Rhône, and the city has a strong spirit cultural. You can climb the hill of Fourvière on foot – a very long staircase – or by funicular, and then look at the panorama of the city. I stayed in 2015 at La Croix-Rousse and from there, I saw spectacular sunsets. (I could also see both rivers, but barely in one of the cases). It will take at least half a day to visit the Museum of Fine Arts, one of France’s leading art museums.
