Cinematography and Silk

Lyon is an amazing city with an incredibly diverse history. Among other things it was the home of the Lumière brothers, the inventors of the Cinematograph. Our morning outing was a visit to the Musée Lumière, set in the brother's family home in the heart of the Monplaisir neighbourhood to the east of the city centre. It was a fascinating place to visit where you could have spent all day if you stopped to watch all of the old films recorded by the Lumières.

Our afternoon excursion took us to Croix-Rousse, the silk workers district high on the escarpment to the north of the city. Getting there was quite interesting. There is a special Metro line into the area and the hill it climbs is so steep that they use a rack-railway...which are more commonly found in the mountains.

After looking through an interesting museum dedicated to the silk workers and their industrial battle in the 19th Century, we were taken across the road for a demonstration of weaving using a 19th Century hand and foot operated loom. Even allowing for our guide spending a lot of time talking, hand weaving is incredibly slow and it is little wonder hand-woven silk costs hundreds and thousands of Euros per metre.