The pink gravelly acres of place Bellecour were first laid out in 1617, and today form a focus on the peninsula, with views up to the looming bulk of Notre-Dame-de-Fourvière. The square is vast, dwarfing even the central statue of Louis XIV in the guise of a Roman emperor. Running south, rue Auguste-Comte is full of antique shops selling heavily framed eighteenth-century art works, and rue Victor-Hugo is a pedestrian precinct that continues north of place Bellecour on rue de la République all the way up to the back of the Hôtel de Ville below the area of La Croix-Rousse .

 

South of place Bellecour on rue de la Charité, running parallel to rue Auguste-Comte on the Rhône side, is Lyon's best museum, the Musée des Tissus (Tues-Sun 10am-5.30pm; 20F/¬4.57). It doesn't quite live up to its claim to cover the history of decorative cloth through the ages, but it does have brilliant collections from certain periods, most notably third-century Greek-influenced and sixth-century Coptic tapestries, woven silk and painted linen from Egypt. The fragment of woven wool aux poissons ("with fish"; second to third century AD) has an artistry unmatched in European work until at least the eighteenth century. There are silks from Baghdad contemporary with the Thousand and One Nights , and carpets from Iran, Turkey, India and China. The most boring stuff is that produced in Lyon itself: seventeenth- to eighteenth-century hangings and chair covers. Sadly, there's almost nothing from the period of the Revolution, but there are some lovely twentieth-century pieces - Sonia Delaunay's Tissus Simultanés , Michel Dubost's L'Oiseau Bleu and Raoul Dufy's Les Coquillages . The dull Musée des Arts Décoratifs next door (Tues-Sun 10am-noon & 2-5.30pm; same ticket as Musée des Tissus) displays seventeenth- and eighteenth-century tapestries, furniture and ceramics.

To the south, the station area around Perrache is of little interest, but across the adjacent pont Gallieni, at 14 av Berthelot, is the Centre d'Histoire de la Résistance et de la Déportation (Wed-Sun 9am-5.30pm; 25F/¬3.81; Mº Perrache/Jean-Macé). 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 in the very cellars and cells in which Klaus Barbie, the Gestapo boss of Lyon, tortured and murdered his victims. Barbie was brought back from Uruguay a few years ago and tried in Lyon for crimes against humanity; the principal "exhibit" is a 45-minute video of the trial in which some of his victims recount their terrible ordeal at his hands - very moving and unsettling.

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. The bourgeoisie had certainly been running scared, with only the area between the rivers, place des Terreaux and just north of St-Nizier still under their control. Unfortunately for the canuts (the silk workers), their employers were able to call on outside aid, and 30,000 extra troops arrived to quash the rebellion. Today, traces of this working-class life are rapidly disappearing as the district fills with fashionable bars and restaurants, as well as a row of smart shops all down the long pedestrian rue de la République. Close to St-Nizier, at 13 rue de la Poulaillerie, is the Musée de l'Imprimerie et de la Banque (Wed-Sun 9.30am-noon & 2-6pm; 25F/¬3.81); unfortunately, its collection is unattractively displayed, which is a pity, for Lyon was both a leading publishing and banking centre in Renaissance times.

Further north, the monumental nineteenth-century fountain in front of the even more monumental Hôtel de Ville on place des Terreaux symbolizes rivers straining to reach the ocean. It was designed by Bartholdi, of Statue of Liberty fame, although the rows of watery leaks that sprout up unexpectedly across the rest of the square, are a modern addition. Opposite is the large bulk of the Musée des Beaux-Arts (Wed-Sun 10.30am-6pm; 25F/¬3.81), housed in a former Benedictine abbey and whose collections are second in France only to those in the Louvre. The museum is organized roughly by genre, with nineteenth- and twentieth-century sculpture, represented by Canova, Barye and Rodin's Temptation of St Anthony in the ex-chapel on the ground floor. Medieval sculpture is on the first floor along with antiquities and objets d'art , including a particularly fine collection of sixth- to nineteenth-century Japanese, Korean and Chinese ceramics used in traditional tea ceremonies. In the painting collection, the twentieth century is particularly well represented: Gino Severini's La Famille du Peintre of 1939; spring and summer light in Bonnard's canvases beside wintry port scenes by Marquet; Van Dongens and de la Fresnayes throwing amused looks at their women friends; one of Monet's Thames series; La Petite Niçoise by Berthe Morisot; and Degas' almost luminous pastel of the Café-Concert aux Ambassadeurs . This section was augmented considerably by the donation, in 1998, of Lyon-born actress Jaqueline Delubac's collection of thirty Impressionist pieces, including works by Picasso and Matisse. Of the early nineteenth-century collection, La Maraichère , attributed to David, is outstanding, and you can work your way back through Rubens, Zurbarán, El Greco, Tintoretto and a hundred others.

Behind the Hôtel de Ville, on the edge of several linked squares, stands Lyon's Neoclassical opera house , slightly uncertain of itself, having recently been redesigned by the architect Jean Nouvel. The Neoclassical exterior now supports a huge glass Swiss roll by way of a roof, and the interior - at least the only part accessible without a ticket - is now entirely black with silver stairways climbing into the darkness.