Auguste and Louis Lumière were born in this house in Besançon at 1 Place Rondot Saint-Quentin, which now has the address 1 Place Victor Hugo. They lived here until 1870, when their family moved back to Lyon. All you loyal readers of my Lyon posts may recall that Lyon was Read More …
Besançon’s municipal theater was designed in 1775 by Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, the architect who also built (for example) the Rotonde de la Villette in Paris. In an age when most theaters were horseshoe shaped, which meant that many of the seats offered little or no view of the stage — La Read More …
At first glance you might think this building was a mosque, but it is actually a synagogue. When the Jewish community of Besançon commissioned the building from the local architect Pierre Marnotte (1797-1882), they specifically requested him to design a synagogue de style mauresque (in the Moorish style). It is Read More …
To do a one-hour circle cruise around Besançon on the Doubs River, you have your choice of two boats, which are called (of course) the Victor Hugo and the Vauban. I took the Vauban, which is the smaller of the two. First I watched it from the shore as it Read More …
Before leaving home, I took out a seven-day subscription to VéloCité, Besançon’s bicycle sharing system, at their website www.velocite.besancon.fr/. This cost me all of two Euros — exactly a quarter of what it cost in Paris at that time. As of 2019, the price for a seven-day subscription in Paris Read More …
When I visited Besançon in May 2014 the new tramway had been installed but was not yet operational, as only two of the nineteen trams had been delivered. They were already doing some test runs, but I did not see any of these during my visit. The new tramway was Read More …
Like a number of other medium-sized French cities (such as Reims and Avignon, for example), Besançon has two railway stations: the traditional one near the center of town and a new TGV station on the outskirts. The TGV train in my photos has just arrived from Frankfurt am Main, Germany Read More …
This fort is on a hill at the northwest end of Besançon, on the opposite side of the city from the Citadel. It was named after an Italian engineer and architect called Jean Griffoni, who built a small fort on this site in 1595. (So it was not named after Read More …