Overview
Italian bankers and silk merchants built here in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, in tall narrow houses on deep plots. The traboules linked street to street through courtyards so that silk could be carried under cover, and around forty are open to the public, marked by small plaques. The quarter was slated for demolition in the 1960s and saved by France’s first conservation law, which was drafted for it.
Highlights
The Long Traboule at 54 rue Saint-Jean runs through four buildings and four courtyards. Saint-Jean Cathedral holds a fourteenth-century astronomical clock that still strikes at set hours. Eat in a bouchon, the small Lyonnais restaurants serving offal, quenelles and pork — the certified ones carry a plaque.