The astronomical clock
A fourteenth-century machine still turning, rooster and angels included.
Otourly — CC BY-SA 3.0 · Elliott Brown from Birmingham, United Kingdom — CC BY-SA 2.0 · Elliott Brown from Birmingham, United Kingdom — CC BY-SA 2.0 · Elliott Brown from Birmingham, United Kingdom — CC BY-SA 2.0
Covered passages cutting through houses street to street, made by silk merchants to move goods dry — hundreds hide behind ordinary doors in Vieux Lyon and Croix-Rousse. Dozens are free to walk: push the door politely, cross quietly, and you emerge in a Renaissance courtyard invisible from any street.
Lyon is France's oldest Christian seat — its church dates from the second century, its early martyrs are famous — so its bishop held honorary precedence over all the country's bishops, a title kept to this day.
Cathedral first, then the long Rue Saint-Jean with its lanes and traboules (try the famous no. 54), Place du Change, and the Lyon history museum in the Gadagne palace for depth — then the funicular up to Fourvière. A dense, full half-day.
Sign in to write your review of this place.
No reviews yet — be the first.
Saint-Jean is old Lyon's heart and the seat of the 'Primate of the Gauls' — Lyon's archbishop has carried that title for centuries, his church holding precedence in all France. Built across three centuries, it joins a Romanesque apse to a Gothic front. Its treasure is a fourteenth-century astronomical clock — among Europe's oldest still working — with a pecking rooster and circling angels at posted times, and its façade carries three hundred carved stone medallions that read like a miniature medieval encyclopedia. The square before it is the gate of Vieux Lyon: from here spread the Gothic-Renaissance quarter's lanes — France's largest preserved old town after Paris — the secret traboule passages between houses, and the funicular station to Fourvière steps away.
A fourteenth-century machine still turning, rooster and angels included.
A façade carved with scenes reading like a medieval encyclopedia.
Vieux Lyon's heart — cafés, and the start of lanes and traboules.
Place Saint-Jean, 69005 Lyon