Lyon is at the confluence of the Rhône and Saône Rivers. The Rhône (first photo) is the larger and longer of the two. In Switzerland, where it comes from, some of the locals call it the Rotten River — not because it is rotten in the English sense of the Read More …
From March 2012 to the beginning of the corona virus pandemic in 2020, there was a direct high-speed train connection (only once a day, but still) from Frankfurt via Mannheim, Karlsruhe, Strasbourg, Belfort and Besançon to Lyon, and then on to Avignon, Aix-en-Provence and Marseille, all without changing trains. Before Read More …
When the French playwright Molière (1622-1673) was twenty-three years old he was forced to leave Paris with his company of actors because of debts they had run up. They spent thirteen years as an itinerant theater company in different parts of France, for instance in Pézenas, Narbonne, Albi, Carcassonne, Toulouse, Read More …
One thing I’ll say for the Lyon opera house: you can’t mistake it for any other building in Lyon, or for any other opera house in the world that I know of. Or do you know of any other building that has a nineteenth century façade topped by a huge Read More …
Looming above Lyon from its position on a hilltop on the right bank of the Saône River, the Basilica Notre-Dame de Fourvière can be seen from numerous places in the city. So it is certainly a prominent landmark, even for those of us who dislike the building and what it Read More …
When I saw the beautiful old Théâtre des Célestins in Lyon from the year 1881 I knew I had to go and see something there, no matter what they were playing. It turned out that they were doing a seventeenth century comedy by Molière (1622-1673) called Les Femmes savantes (The Read More …
On the evening of January 29, 1956, the last tram (aka streetcar) made its last run on the last line of Lyon’s urban tramway system. That was the old line number 4 from Perrache Station to the Parc de la Tete d’Or. “At that period, and for several decades afterwards,” Read More …
Lyon has an excellent bicycle sharing system called Vélo’v, which is a combination of the French word Vélo, meaning bicycle, and the English word Love. Vélo’v was not the first bike sharing program in France, by any means, but when it was inaugurated in 2005 is was the largest. It Read More …
The Museum of Fine Arts (Musée des Beaux Arts) in Lyon is located in a former Benedictine abbey dating from the 17th century. In the center there is a pleasant sculpture garden with a cloister running around it. The museum was founded in 1803 with a first consignment of 110 Read More …
Auguste Lumière (1862-1954) and his brother Louis Lumière (1864-1948) became very wealthy in their early twenties thanks to their invention of a machine that could mass-produce photographic gelatin dry-plates. Their factory in Lyon, France, quickly became one of the largest in Europe and their dry-plates became a best-selling product because Read More …