Lyon Audio Tours

Two Roman emperors were born in Lyon. The Lumiere brothers invented cinema here in 1895. Paul Bocuse spent six decades making it the uncontested gastronomic capital of France. The city has a habit of generating things that spread everywhere else. Yet it sits in the French imagination as somehow less than Paris, which suits it perfectly. Locals call children 'gones' and themselves Lyonnais, and they cook duck livers and tripe in tiny traboules-flanked bistros without much interest in what Paris thinks.

The traboules are the city's great secret.

These covered passages connect buildings through interior courtyards across Vieux Lyon and La Croix-Rousse, built so silk workers could carry fabric through the rain without damage, then used by Resistance fighters in the 1940s to move through the city undetected. Above everything, Fourviere Hill carries the Byzantine confection of Notre-Dame basilica, visible from almost anywhere. The hill is known locally as 'the hill that prays.' La Croix-Rousse, steeply terraced above the old town, is 'the hill that works.' The city has always been comfortable with that duality.