Running & Reading in Rennes: Lyon, or, Like the Romans, We Crossed the Rhone

Avignon and the Rhone from the train.

We took an early-morning train from Avignon to Lyon. Unfortunately, this meant taking an even earlier shuttle to the train station because the new(ish) station serving high-speed trains through Avignon is several miles outside of town while the older station serving "normal" trains was just a short walk from our hotel. Once in the new station, we were surprised by the large number of Germans hanging around. Only when we got on our train with them did we realize that the train continued on through France to Frankfurt, Germany, so presumably these were all tourists on their way home.

Fourvière Hill with the basilica and the Eiffel Tower look-alike.

Lyon from the summit of Fourvière Hill.
Mont Blanc is somewhere in all that haze.

We got to Lyon mid-morning. It's almost straight north up the Rhone from Avignon so it marks the point at which our "Circle Tour of France" made the big turn northward to start heading home. Lyon is in the Rhone-Alpes region, my fourteenth region (2/3 of the way to seeing every region!) and Lisa's fifteenth. Lyon is the third-largest city in France and it's situated at the confluence of two major rivers, the Rhone and the Saone, with a a huge steep hill behind it - not unlike Pittsburgh, actually. This strategic position appealed to the ancient Romans, who founded the city in the first century BC, and it became the most important city in Roman Gaul. After a day in Arles, I was excited about continuing my tour of ancient Roman cities in southern France!

Hotel staircase.

We started by taking a bus across town from the train station to "old Lyon," the medieval/Renaissance part where our hotel was located. The desk clerk was SO friendly and helpful! He gave us a map, a booklet about old Lyon, restaurant recommendations, sights to see, where to get the best views of the city, where to get the best ice cream - everything we could possibly want to know. He was better than a tourist office and gave us a good impression of Lyon right away. The hotel itself was charming - on a pedestrian street in an old building with a spiral staircase and all the rooms opening onto the staircase. The hotel was one of the original post offices when it was first established in France. As a result, it slanted just a bit!

Stairs up the hill.

From there, we walked back the way we came across the Saone River to the Saturday market we saw lining the river. We foraged for supplies for a picnic lunch: bread and cheese (of course) plus a lot southern produce we don't really have in Cesson - cherries, olives, and watermelon. We also got a huge hunk of nougat to take home to the US to share with Lisa's mom. We decided to have our picnic lunch on top of Fourvière Hill, the huge hill behind old Lyon. It was a good idea, but we stupidly decided to walk up the hill rather than take the funicular. (Lisa adds that she ended up being very cranky while sweating up the hill in a sun dress.) It was a hot, sunny, muggy day and climbing hundreds of steep steps up a 950-foot-tall hill was not fun. However, we enjoyed our picnic at the top, cooled down, and got some great views from the summit looking east over the city. In fact, we could even see Mont Blanc, the highest peak in the Alps and about a hundred miles away on the French-Italian border!

Basilica of Notre-Dame de Fourvière.

The summit of Fourvière has a couple features that make it like a mini-Paris. First, there's the funicular up the hill, similar to the one in Paris going up the hill of Montmartre (although Lyon's is older). Second, there's the Tour Metallique, a 19th-century tower that looks like the upper portion of the Eiffel Tower. Third, there's the Basilica of Notre-Dame de Fourvière, built in the late 19th century to thank the Virgin Mary for saving Lyon from the Prussians during the Franco-Prussian War (sort of like Paris' Sacre-Coeur being built in the same time period to ask God's forgiveness because of the "divine punishment" of the French defeat by the Prussians). The basilica is very different from Sacre-Coeur, though. It's not as big and it's built in more of a traditional western church style than the neo-Byzantine architecture of Sacre-Coeur. Inside, there are lots of mosaics dealing with the life of Mary and her miraculous interventions in French history. Sadly, there's a large restoration project in the works right now so there was a lot of scaffolding (like so many other churches we've visited this year!). Below the main sanctuary is a much-less ornate one dedicated to Joseph - apparently the money ran out after completing the Mary-centric upstairs!

Joan of Arc mosaic from the basilica.

Outside the basilica, we refilled our water bottle at a public water fountain and met a young American couple doing the same thing. They knew we were American because of our stainless steel water bottle, they said; no French person would carry something like that! They're from Portland, Oregon, but they've been working in Paris for the past year (they didn't say specifically what they did) and were now traveling around France, much like us. It was strange to meet our doppelgangers.

Roman theater.

Part of a chariot race mosaic, Gallo-Roman Museum.
This guy obviously did not win the race.

Also on top of the hill are the remains of two ancient Roman theaters and the Gallic-Roman Museum. The Roman city was actually located on the top of the hill and it was only in the Middle Ages that this area was abandoned as the population moved down to the lowlands along the rivers (probably because the aqueducts stopped working and they needed fresh water - that's Lisa's guess). We looked at the theaters from the outside but didn't go in and climb around. I had my fill of provincial Roman theaters the day before at Arles. Plus, it was so hot and humid that we preferred to go inside the museum. It was fantastic, probably the best collection of ancient Roman material I've seen outside of Italy (although, to be fair, I haven't seen much ancient Roman stuff outside Italy). I think it was more interesting and better-explained than even the Louvre's collection. It was one of the few places where I commandeered Lisa's camera to get pictures of the inscriptions, funerary monuments, statues, mosaics, and sarcophagi, all of which I can hopefully use the next time I teach a class on Roman civilization. (I could post tons of pictures here, but I won't since most of them are probably only of interest to classicists like me!)

Traboule (covered passageway).

Cathedral.

After the museum, we walked back down the hill into old Lyon - a much easier walk than coming up. We did some shopping at an artisanal honey store, a used book store, and a stained glass store. We also walked through one of the traboule, the covered passageways that were constructed in the Renaissance to link two parallel streets by going through the courtyards of the buildings between. They were meant to protect the skeins of silk as they were moved between workshops (Lyon was a major silk-production center in the Renaissance). We checked out the cathedral, which was just a big Gothic church. Most of the exterior sculpture was destroyed during the French Revolution. The only real distinguishing feature that I noticed was that the tower of the church wasn't the pointy Gothic spire you see on northern churches but a squat square tower in the Italian style, like what one sees on old churches in Rome. We also looked at the "archaeological park" next to the cathedral which contained the remains of very old churches pre-dating the cathedral. In fact, Lyon claims to have the oldest Christian community in France.

Dramatic clouds, but where's Jesus or Mary?

We had dinner in old Lyon, too, then went to the ice cream place recommended by the hotel clerk. We shared a scoop of blood orange sorbet and it was delicious! On the walk back to the hotel, we stopped to admire the setting sun and the clouds. It was very dramatic and it looked like something out of one of the sixteenth-century paintings of Jesus or Mary we had seen in Italy the week before (although I don't think it looks as dramatic in these pictures as it did in person). After that, it was off to bed before our day-trip the next day to Geneva, Switzerland. Lyon is definitely a city I would like to which I would like to return. It was very beautiful and everyone was so friendly. It would be a great place to come spend a relaxing few days, I think.