Green Courtyard in Lyon

The peak of our day was a guided walk in Vieux Lyon (Old Lyon--the oldest part of the city), arranged by the city's information office.

This blip spares you a view of the thirty-odd people in the group. Amazingly, it worked, due to an excellent French-speaking guide and a very agreeable set of personalities.

The area is basically Renaissance in style, with much added and changed over the years. It is honeycombed with narrow streets and innumerable even narrower covered passages between them, called traboules from the Latin transambulare (walking through). The French verb to navigate them is trabouler--to walk through, and we did a lot of it, in single file.

This is perhaps the most picturesque of the dozen or more courtyards we experienced--most even smaller. Note in particular the essentially gothic ribbing under the arches. (Excuse my layman's terminology) View it large