Lyon

The Presqu’île, or peninsula, is most visitors’ first port of call. Its dominant feature is place Bellecour, whose pink gravelly acres were first laid out in 1617, and which offer fabulous views up to the looming bulk of Notre-Dame de Fourvière. The southern portion of the peninsula starts around Perrache station, beyond which a huge regeneration project has smartened up the previously down-at-heel confluence district.

To the north of place Bellecour at the top of quai St-Antoine is the quartier Mercière, the old commercial centre of the town, with sixteenth- and seventeenth-century houses lining rue Mercière, and the church of St-Nizier, whose bells used to announce the nightly closing of the city’s gates. In the silk-weavers’ uprising of 1831, workers fleeing the soldiers took refuge in the church, only to be massacred. Today, traces of this working-class life are almost gone, edged out by bars, restaurants and designer shops, the latter along rue du Président Edouard-Herriot and the long pedestrian rue de la République in particular.

Housed in a former Benedictine abbey on place des Terreaux, the collections of the Musée des Beaux-Arts are second in France only to those in the Louvre. The museum is organized roughly by genre, with nineteenth- and twentieth-century sculpture in the ex-chapel on the ground floor. The first floor houses a particularly interesting collection of Egyptian artefacts including coffins, amulets and stone tablets, in addition to a selection of medieval French, Dutch, German and Italian woodcarving and antiquities, coins and objets d’art. Upstairs, twentieth-century painting is represented by Picasso and Matisse, and there are also works by Braques, a brace of Bonnards and a gory Francis Bacon. The nineteenth century is covered by the Impressionists and their forerunners, Corot and Courbet; there are works by the Lyonnais artists Antoine Berjon and Fleury Richard, and from there you can work your way back through Rubens, Zurbarán, El Greco, Tintoretto and more. Keep an eye out for Rembrant’s earliest known work from 1625, The Stoning of St Steven.

Reached by one of the three passerelles (footbridges) crossing the Saône from Terreaux and the Presqu’île, Vieux Lyon is made up of the three villages of St-Jean, St-Georges and St-Paul at the base of the hill overlooking the Presqu’île. South of place St-Paul, the cobbled streets of Vieux Lyon, pressed close together beneath the hill of Fourvière, form a backdrop of Renaissance and medieval facades, bright night-time illumination and a swelling chorus of well-dressed Lyonnais in search of supper or a midday splurge.

Well worth the short trek up to Fourvière, the underground Musée Gallo-Romain showcases exhibits from prehistoric times to 7 AD, the sheer number and splendour of which serve to underline Roman Lyon’s importance. Among the many highlights is a fragment of the so-called “Claudian Table”, a fine bronze engraving of a speech by the Lyon-born Emperor Claudius, discovered in 1528 by a Lyonnais cloth-maker. Elsewhere look out for a superb Bronze Age processional chariot, and some remarkably well-preserved mosaics – “In The Circus”, for example, recalls the city’s standing as one of Roman Gaul’s most popular centres of entertainment. These antiquities consist of two ruined theatres dug into the hillside – the larger of which was built by Augustus in 15 BC and extended in the second century by Hadrian to seat 10,000 spectators. Nowadays, they are the focal point for the Nuits de Fourvière music and film festival each summer.

A hulking, incredibly ornate wedding cake of a church, the Basilique Notre-Dame de Fourvière was built, like the Sacré-Coeur in Paris, in the aftermath of the 1871 Commune to emphasize the defeat of the godless socialists. And like the Sacré-Coeur, its hilltop position has become a defining element in the city’s skyline. The interior is currently enveloped in scaffolding, and will be for some time, but down in the crypt there’s some beautifully executed stonework, plus an ornate turquoise mosaic ceiling in the apse. The observation tower is presently closed but a rooftop tour is a vertigo-worthy replacement – if you can’t stomach that, you can take in the magnificent citywide views from the esplanade. From here, the montée St-Barthélémy footpath winds back downhill to Vieux Lyon through the hanging gardens.

On the skyline from Fourvière, you can’t miss the gleaming pencil-like skyscraper that belongs to Lyon’s home-grown Crédit Lyonnais bank. This is the centrepiece of Part-Dieu, a business-culture-commerce hub which includes one of the biggest public libraries outside Paris, a mammoth concert hall and a busy shopping centre. While it’s not the most aesthetically pleasing area, you don’t have to go far to enjoy some culture.

Overlooked by the bristling antennae of the international headquarters of Interpol, the Cité Internationale is made up of glass-heavy luxury apartments, slick restaurants, and the Palais des Congres conference centre. The complex is also home to the Musée d’Art Contemporain, a grand, white building with an imposing Neoclassical facade designed by Renzo Piano. It hosts excellent temporary exhibitions as well as the Lyon art biennial in every odd-numbered year.

Film buffs won’t want to miss the enlightening Institut Lumière, housed within the grandiose Art Nouveau villa that was, for a period, the home of Antoine Lumière, father of Auguste and Louis, two of the earliest pioneers of film. The emphasis here is very much on the earliest forms of photographic techniques, which subsequently paved the way for film. Prize exhibits include early magic latterns, the first cinematograph (1885), and the first ever autochromes, or colour plates, one of which is a picture of Antoine’s third daughter relaxing in the Winter Garden. Don’t miss the stunning collection of photos by celebrated Lumière photographer, Gabriel Veyre – the quality is so good that it’s hard to believe they were taken in the 1930s. Meanwhile, in the basement projection room, you can view some entertaining cinematic clips including the first film, Les Sorties des Usines Lumière, showing workers leaving the Lumière factory. In the theatre across the way, several different films are shown nightly.

Housed within the former military medical school used by the Gestapo during World War II, the Centre d’Histoire de la Résistance et de la Déportation makes for a sobering but worthwhile visit. In addition to a library of books, videos, memoirs and other documents recording experiences of resistance, occupation and deportation to the camps, there’s an exhibition space housed over the very cellars and cells in which Klaus Barbie, the Gestapo boss of Lyon, tortured and murdered his victims. Barbie was brought back from Bolivia and tried in Lyon in 1987 for crimes against humanity; the centrepiece of the exhibition is a moving and unsettling 45-minute video of the trial in which some of his victims recount their terrible ordeal.

Thirty-four kilometres northeast of Lyon, on the N84 is Pérouges, a lovely village of cobbled alleyways and ancient houses. Its charm has not gone unnoticed by the French film industry either – historical dramas such as The Three Musketeers were filmed within its fortifications – nor by some of the residents, who have fought long and hard for preservation orders on its most interesting buildings. The result is an immaculate work of conservation. Local traditional life is also thriving in the hands of a hundred or so workers who still weave locally grown hemp