I did a couple of tourist things today.
I took the tram tour around the city and learned all about silk. Silk is what Lyon was famous for from about the mid-1400s until the French Revolution. Once the upper classes were overthrown, the silk producers had no one left to buy the stuff and the city was thrown into economic despair. Ooops.
By the mid-1800s, however, Napoleon was able to revive the industry by making everyone wear silk. This second wave of silk industry success lasted until WWI. Priorities changed.
I went to one of the silk ateliers where the sign said I could come in and learn all about how silk is made in an authentic workshop. I was the only one there aside from the people working and they just ignored me and went on with their work. It was like being invisible. Nobody even said bonjour. I was hoping to see some silk worms and the spinning of the thread, but all that seemed to happen in the atelier was dying and printing of the silk. I didn’t stay long because it was all kind of creepy being invisible. I can cross that off my list of which super-power I might like to have, anyway.
Elsewhere, I also I learned that Lyon has over 150 murals painted on the outside of their buildings –most of the trompe l’oeil variety. The biggest, at over 1200 square meters, is the Mur des Canuts. (The term “canut” means silk weaver in France. It seems to mean completely different things in other cultures).
Anyway, this entire wall is a painting. It’s really just a big blank wall. Everything you see here is all a painting — the lamppost, the car, the trees, the buildings, the people…everything — and this is only one section of the wall. Every few years the whole things is upgraded. The people in it age, acquire families, the kids get older, the cars and bicycles are updated, the plants grow and recede over time. It’s kind of cool.
Uh oh..can you spot the upgrade made to the wall today?? I had to scrunch down so it would look like I was sitting on the steps. Are your l’oeils tromped or what?
So once the tour was over, I found a Roman ruin, as promised in a previous post. The crumbling old amphitheatre (Amphitheatre of the Three Gauls), pictured below, was first built in 12 BC and held an audience of 20,000. Not sure what they performed there since most of the good playwrights and composers hadn’t even been born yet. The plaque says this is where “the representatives of the 64 nations of the three Gauls would meet every year”. The three Gauls (Gallia Celtica, Belgica and Aquitania) encompassed most of what is Europe today. So, basically an Iron Age EU.
Aside from politics, this amphitheatre was also a hotspot for torturing Christian martyrs.
I like this because nobody has tried to restore it or fix it up. They just put a fence around it and let it be. I can’t even believe how intact it all is after over 2,000 years. (PS: the buildings in the background aren’t part of it and were built more recently)
Then I decided to climb these stairs. It’s what everybody does here. There are a lot of stairs like this all over Lyon.
Then I took a photo of the view from almost the top.
Apparently the Alps are back there somewhere, but they are only visible if the weather is about to turn really bad. Nobody here likes seeing the Alps.
Then I went back down the stairs.
Then it was time for un petit dodo.
Things get pretty quiet in the hood here after 2:00pm. Lunch is precisely from 12:00 to 2:00 and everyone and their dog is out wining and dining. Then most of the restaurants and shops close. Around 4:30-5:00 the kids get out of school, so they make a bit of a racket and some of the shops re-open. But nothing much else happens until 7:30ish when the restaurants and all the other shops re-open for the supper crowd. That goes on until midnight when everybody finally stops eating and goes home.
And then nothing much happens until about 10:00am.
It’s like a whole different country over here.
The Well-Intentioned Traveller 