One thing for which Lyon is famous is its traboules. A traboule started out as a mid-block passageway between two medieval streets. If you didn’t have a traboule cut between a block of buildings slammed up next to one another, you’d have to schlep down to the end of the street to get to the rue parallel to you.
Traboules in Lyon were evidently covered passageways. During the
height of the silk industry, which was big in Lyon, silk workers used traboules
to carry bolts of cloth between workshops without worrying about being rained
on.
During the German occupation of 1942-45, traboules were also
used by members of the Resistance to do a flit when under pursuit.
Monday I went in search of traboules. Rue Saint Jean in Vieux
Lyon is supposed to be The Place for them. At first I came a cropper, but then I
was on a parallel street and a young couple had tried a door. A woman poked her
head out the window of her flat a couple of floors up, asked them if they were
looking for the traboule, and then gave them directions. I didn’t grasp all the
directions, so I just followed them, et voi!à!
Evidently that covered thing has gone with the centuries,
because all the trabules I visited were open to the sky.
Also, several of them no longer seemed to go from street to
street; or—if they did, they weren’t entirely accessible to tourons.
Moreover—these passageways are actually entrances to people’s
flats. So I was thinking that it must be passing annoying to have tourons
barging into the courtyard, dark and uninviting though it be, when you’re
trying to take out the garbage.
Okay, traboules:
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