museums – Taran's Tales

Cat-sitting in Montpellier.

It was a big wrench leaving Ospedaletti and returning to France again. Something magical there had grabbed both of us and, as we got into our car to drive away, our final memory of our Italian tryst was the beautiful sound of waves crashing against the rocks twenty feet away. So, long before we arrived at our next destination, we were quite convinced that we had to spend more time in La Bella Italia and had already started planning our next trip to Europe!

Alas that was not to be for a while – hopefully in the last quarter of 2018 – and we had to focus our minds on living for three weeks in a stranger’s home, and looking after their beloved cat. Montpellier is a five-hour drive and we arrived there in the early evening darkness, eventually finding a parking space a short walk from the apartment building. We soon discovered that on-street parking is a major problem for Montpellier residents, and the locals were extremely adept at squeezing into the tightest of spaces, using a little gentle bumper contact to assist them as necessary, a technique we approached warily in our lease car!

Tight parking – the driver of the VW had carefully placed some sort of cushion between his rear bumper and the utilities box and then more or less levered his car into the space, leaving his paint on my rear bumper!

We dined well that evening at Bistro Alco, with Kevin our host, while his wife Sheila stayed home finishing off some on-line business before their departure the following morning. Our charge, a black house-cat named Mr.D’Arcy, was not overly excited by our arrival and immediately hid under the bed, quite obviously well aware that his “parents” were departing imminently; animals have an uncanny understanding of the meaning of a pile of suitcases by the front door!

The second floor apartment on rue de Barcelone was only a ten-minute walk from Place de la Comédie and yet, surprisingly quiet, which was a relief for my city-living phobia. With about a third of the city’s population being university students, there was always lots of life centred around the many cafes and bars in the old town. The University of Montpellier, officially established in 1289, is one of the oldest in the world and has been a centre of medical excellence from an even earlier date. The city is, of course, very much more than just a university town, but the atmosphere of studious, intellectual, youthful activity pervades many aspects of the life there and made for an agreeable ambience for this worldly pair of travellers. Which was just as well, as with the problem of parking, we were loath to lose our spot any more than necessary and spent much of our stay on Shanks’ pony, exercising my deteriorating knees to the max, but at the same time getting a good feel of the city-dwelling life. Actually this was quite a good experience, residing as we were in a city with so much to see and appreciate.

So it was back to a life of wandering the streets, seeking culture wherever we could, window shopping mindful of the approach of Christmas, and of course, enjoying French café culture yet again. But having said that, our first attempt to partake of same was a failure. On our second or third day, having finally made friends with Mr D’Arcy, we walked up to Place de la Comedie, thinking we would enjoy a brief late morning coffee and watch the world go by awhile, before taking an afternoon drive to the seaside. But our choice of venue was marred by a waiter who seemed to have no idea of time whatsoever, and after waiting more than fifteen minutes for our order to arrive, our patience frayed and, remembering our midday date with the parking meter, we upped sticks and hot-footed it back to rescue our car from imminent clamping or, worse still, being towed.

The nearest seaside in Montpellier entails a fifteen minute drive to Palavas-les-Flots. However we decided to go a few minutes further to the fishing village of Le Grau-du-Roi, the driver not wishing to stop at La Grande Motte, a purpose-built resort from the sixties, full of concrete apartment buildings, the only redeeming feature of which was the avant-garde architecture.

Avant-garde architecture of La Grande Motte

Le Grau-du-Roi was much more traditional, and hence more to our liking. We walked along the seafront, neatly paved with modern mosaics, braving the brisk wintry breeze raising white caps on the bay, until we came to a touching statue of a mother and her child peering into the distance, searching the horizon for their husband/father’s fishing boat; it was yet another reminder of this coast’s strong traditions with seafaring.

Statue of mother and child in Le-Grau-du-Roi

A canal passes right through the centre of the village, its banks lined with fishing boats, old and new and various pleasure craft and tour boats; tours into the étangs (lagoons) of the nearby Camargue are popular tourist activities, though not such an attractive proposition in early winter. We stopped awhile at one of the cafes lining the quay on the right bank (that’s the bank on your right as you float downstream!), before a late afternoon drive through La Petite Camargue, where we were happy to see some of the famous pink flamingoes.

Another day we drove to Sète, an interesting town built upon and around a hill, Mont St Clair, that was a separate island until the mid-seventeenth century when Louis XIV decreed that the town and port be built to provide an outlet to the sea for the Canal du Midi. This work included reclaiming land between the north-east corner of the island and the mainland, building canals and bridges, and constructing a long isthmus connecting the southwest corner to the land and effectively creating the sea-water lagoon, Étang deThau. The reclaimed land is where most of the town’s industry is found, and the isthmus has nature reserves and vineyards planted in the sand, the wines from which are said to have a distinct flavour of the sea. We spent an hour or more wandering the paths of the small wooded park that covers the peak of the hill, and enjoying the views. Eventually we drove back down into the port area, and looked around the shops before having our usual afternoon coffee break at a café on Quai de la Résistance, overlooking the fishing boats moored either side of the main Royal Canal.

One more trip to the seaside found us making a return visit to the Camargue, on a glorious, sunny, windless autumn day, stopping first to befriend, and feed with fresh green grass from our side of the fence, one of the handsome white horses for which the Camargue is so famous, before arriving at the quiet little low-key tourist village of Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, where we hoped to find a place to eat a late lunch. In this we were totally thwarted, as everything closes down at 3pm sharp, so we contented ourselves with admiring the impressive old church that had been built to be as much a place of refuge as a house of religion.

From there we drove back through the Petite Camargue in the late afternoon sunshine, towards the splendid, small, medieval walled town of Aigues-Mortes, hoping, in vain sadly, to see some of the powerful Camarguaise black bulls, bred for the corridas in both France and Spain. This drive included taking the ferry across Le Petit Rhone, on a most unusual ferry that is guided by a cable strung across the river upstream from the boat; a simple effective idea as long as the river is always flowing seawards. It wasn’t clear how they handled an incoming tide!

It was getting dark when we arrived at Aigues-Mortes and we restricted our stay to a walk along the main street, Grande Rue Jean-Jaurès, stopping for a much-needed coffee at Café Express on Place St-Louis, and then succumbing to the temptations at La Cure Gourmande, famous for its sugar cookies, a tasty end to an enjoyable day away from the big city.

With Nîmes being slightly less than an hour’s drive from Montpellier, we arranged to meet my step-sister Selina for lunch one day, and unfortunately, chose a very damp rainy day, prompting us to drive straight to Parking de l’Arènes in the centre of town. We did a bit of shopping before the appointed hour, successfully finding Berenice Nîmes, a milliner we had patronised a couple of years earlier and, naturally, we failed to come away empty-handed . . . either of us this time! We had a good lunch at Ciel de Nîmes, personally waited on by the proprietor, one of Selina’s neighbours; the restaurant is located on the rooftop of the fine new library on one side of Place de la Maison Carré, its ultra-modern architecture being an interesting juxtaposition with the wonderfully preserved Roman temple which gives the square its name. On the drive back to Montpellier we stopped off at Sommières, a medieval fortified village, that I had believed could be a good place to live. This time the grey weather made the place seem a little less desirable, and we contented ourselves watching a huge flock of starlings doing their dramatic flying sculptures, catching sight of a couple of rare coypus along the riverbank, and admiring the graceful passage of a small group of swans which included a black one, another comparative rarity.

We returned to Sommières for a second look a few days later, seeing the town under clear blue skies and bright sunshine. As we were crossing the pedestrian causeway across the river, Le Vidourle, a hot-air balloon arrived, seemingly low on gas as it skimmed the treetops seeking a safe place to land. Nice day as it was, the town still seemed rather gloomy, and somewhat limited in what it offered, so we crossed it off our list of nest sites!

Apart from these few sorties to the countryside, we easily filled our time in Montpellier, strolling around that lively, elegant city. Celine’s niece, Martinka, joined us for one weekend and we enjoyed her young company as we discovered more and more new places.

The neo-classic architecture of Antigone.

Antigone is a new neighbourhood built in the early 1980’s, mostly comprising low-income housing (proving that where there’s a socially conscious will, even the less well off in society can live in attractive surroundings) plus public facilities and local shops. Designed by the Spanish architect Ricardo Bofill, it is an extraordinary collection of “grand neo-classical structures, enlarging classical motifs such as pediments, entablatures and pilasters to a gigantic scale” [Wikipaedia], and yet complimenting the aging grandeur of much of the town centre.

More classical imagery at the entrance to Le Polygone shopping centre.

It is definitely worth taking a couple of hours to stroll around, ending up at the Polygone shopping centre.

Another morning we chose to join a guided tour around the Faculty of Medicin. As we were the only non-Francophones in the group, the French-speaking guide kindly assured us that he would be happy to describe in English anything that we didn’t understand; but when we tried him out on that a couple of times, his English was far more difficult to understand than his French and we reckoned we would do better to rely on our own translations.

The imposing front door of La Faculté de Médecine.

The main building is very impressive with a lot of history and the portrait gallery of past professors includes such worthies as Francois Rabelais. However, it was Le Musée d’Anatomie that was perhaps the most memorable part of the tour. Glass cabinets lining the walls of the long hall, displayed an extraordinary collection of bits of bodies that have been preserved as exhibits for the students to study, dating back to the days when surgery was still very much the domain of those known affectionately as “sawbones”.

Cases of body parts lined the walls of La Conservatoire d’Anatomie.

And nothing was left to the imagination. Veneral disease was rife among students in the nineteenth century and all those stricken were required to make a very realistic scale model of their affected parts for the educational benefit of their colleagues; thus one fairly large case contained well over sixty scarily detailed models of genitalia in various stages of the diseases, which must surely have frightened many a young man away from the joys of casual sexual encounters! However, the display that particularly interested me was a case of dissected knee joints, making me realise just what I was letting myself in for, having committed to bilateral knee replacement surgery upon our return to California.

Two other places well worthy of a visit in this historic city of learning and culture are the beautiful elegant Opera House and La Musee Farbre. The latter includes in its treasures, a fine collection of Dutch and Flemish masterpieces, as well as various French works of art. The museum was practically deserted apart from us and several security guards who seemed to pop up around every corner. We chatted to one, an Englishman in his sixties who seemed to have a somewhat obscure past; he told us that he liked the work there as there was so little violence in art galleries . . . compared to???! Attached to the museum is L’Hôtel de Cabrières-Sabatier d’Espeyran, a lavish nineteenth century mansion, that gives the visitor a good taste of what life was like for the upper classes in those days.

Preparations for the holiday season were well under way by the end of our stay. The Jardin du Champs de Mars was filled with the little huts that are so much a part of Christmas markets everywhere, “Les Hivernales” as they called it in Montpellier, and we spent a couple of evenings supping gluhwein and consuming hot sausages as we perused the many stalls displaying the usual collection of seasonal offerings. A twenty-foot high, brightly illuminated globe, and giant inflated clowns wandering around, added to the festive atmosphere for the delightfully cosmopolitan crowd of revellers of all ages and from all walks of life, that crowded the square. The city also had its own take on the Festival of Lights, Coeur de Ville en Lumières. A dozen or more of the more significant public buildings were used as the backdrop for a series of excellent audio-video presentations that combined musical scores, both modern rock and classical, with graphics that ingeniously used the architectural details, to tell different stories, some historical and some pure fantasy. Each presentation lasted five minutes or more and they were phased so that we had time to stroll from one to the other; it was very impressive.

And, it seemed, no sooner had we arrived than it was time to move on again. Kevin and Sheila were on their way home and we started our own preparations to hit the road again.

Mr Darcy relaxing with his stuffed animals.

Mr.Darcy had been a very easy feline to sit for; he seemed content in his life as a housebound cat, was clean and tidy, and showed no inclination to follow us out into the great outdoors. As long as we fed him regularly and emptied his litter box, his only slight sign of frustration was a tendency to hump his stuffed animals, which was probably more his daily equivalent of an early morning stretch for us mere humans. And I have to say that, with its large balcony and views over the nearby rooftops towards the rising sun, their compact apartment was actually a very easy place to live. Being so close to such a vibrant city centre, I came to understand what attracts people to live like that. However, it didn’t dissuade me from my need to once more feel the freedom of living life in a smaller community with views of sea or countryside, and I looked forward to our next destination, Calella de Palafrugell in the Costa Brava of Spain . . .

PS Writing this over a year later, I am very conscious that the photos do not always do justice to the subject matter. I have told my Facebook friends earlier about my frustrations at having had a catastrophe with our HDD holding our enormous collection of travel pictures. Luckily we recovered perhaps 80% of the files, but the random way the damage affected them has left me without some of our best images. So, my apologies!

Provence Part Two – Saint-Tropez

Five days into our stay in Lorgues we had explored the village pretty well, and decided to take our first trip to the “seaside”. Saint-Tropez dates back to pre-Roman times, and with its natural harbour and ideal defensive position, has, over the ages, often been fought over, and has been under the control of many different peoples including Greeks from Phocaea, Romans, Saracens and Genoans, Germans during the Great War, and Italians and, again, Germans in the second World War. It is also believed to have been where the first contact occurred between the French and the Japanese, when, in 1615, a Japanese delegation on its way to Rome, was obliged by the weather to take shelter in La Golfe de Saint-Tropez. And interestingly, the name Saint Tropez, comes from “Torpes”, a Roman officer under Nero’s reign who was beheaded after making the mistake of being converted to Christianity by Saint Paul; his body was set adrift in a small boat in Pisa, together with a cat and a dog, and supposedly they drifted ashore in this sheltered cove.

In more recent times, Saint-Tropez attracted famous figures from the world of fashion such as Coco Chanel in the 1920s, it was one of the landing sites for the Allied invasion of Southern France in August 1944, and in the 1950s gained some renown as the location for Roger Vadim’s film “And God Created Woman” that launched Brigitte Bardot into the public spotlight.

And since then it has become very much a destination for the rich and famous, an image which justifies the exotic boutiques we found throughout the town, and the beautiful luxury yachts moored along the quay in the small harbour.

The 52km scenic route across the Massif des Maures gave us a slow, but exciting drive through some lovely countryside, along a road of many twists and turns and lots of steep drops, most of which were on the passenger side, to Celine’s slight concern. Although the town now predominantly conveys the feeling of opulent luxury, the highlight for us was a visit to the fascinating Musée Maritime, which gave us a very different perspective of the history of Saint-Tropez. Climbing the hill upwards from the port, and passing several busy restaurants that teased your scribe’s taste buds, we arrived at the foot of a long set of steps leading up to La Citadelle on top of Colline des Moulins.

The first fort was built there in 1589 but was destroyed just six years later. The imposing hexagonal keep and the bastioned outer wall that we see today, were constructed in the early seventeenth century. The tower encloses a large interior courtyard and houses the maritime museum, a dozen rooms in which one discovers the maritime heritage of Saint Tropez from antiquity to the modern-day. The beautifully presented collection of ship and boat models, engravings, paintings of boats and documents recording the lives of famous local people, sea-captains and adventurers, kept us enthralled for a couple of hours. It was fascinating reading extracts from the letters to his wife, sent by the captain of a coastal sailing ship, as he tried to maintain his schedule in spite of the vagaries of the weather. Lying on our backs in a darkened corner of another room and watching a video of the terrors of life aboard one of the last of the old sailing ships on the passage round Cape Horn with cargoes of nickel from New Caledonia, was a relaxing novelty for two sets of weary legs. And it inspired us to stop in the museum shop on the way out and buy “Carnets du Cap Horn”, the journals of Pierre Stephan, one of the brave young captains who, at the turn of the twentieth century, still preferred the rigours of life aboard a four-masted barque to the comforts of the steamships of the day. The friendly Museum staff themselves made our visit complete when, quite out of the blue, they offered us free cups of coffee as we chatted with them and browsed the bookshelves.

The town’s marine heritage on display in La Musèe Maritime.

Eventually, pangs of hunger obliged us to return down the hill in the late afternoon, passing the now-closed restaurants with the tasty-looking menus, and we stopped at a small crêperie to eat very moreish Grand Marnier crêpes. This kept us going nicely for a while as we ambled through the narrow streets leading down to the sea. Being the good tourists that we were, who had yet to get used to French eating hours and afternoon closures, we eventually feasted cheaply on paella and escargots in one of the few quayside restaurants that stayed open all day.

The old town of Saint-Tropez seems small and intimate which added to our enjoyment of this out-of-season visit, without the hoards of tourists that we are told flood the place “in the season”. We wandered through some of the many charming small streets behind the old port, down to the pretty little La Ponche beach where a twenty-first century Dad flew a kite for his toddler, and then onto the concrete remains of a large concrete jetty sticking uglily out into the well protected Golfe de Saint-Tropez, where a young boy was trying his luck with rod and line on the edge of a darkening sea under threatening grey clouds. It was easy to imagine what the town must have been like when it was a small undeveloped village, the home of fishermen, boatbuilders, sailors and captains, many of the latter having learnt their trade at the local School for Captains.

A mega-yacht dwarfs the old quayside buildings

In stark contrast, the tall wooden masts of classic sailing yachts and the gleaming superstructures of megayachts, moored stern-on to the quay around the main port, itself encircled by fading four-storey dwellings, on the cast-iron balustraded balconies of which, sat several comfortable-looking elderly residents, together with the 4km of clean sandy beach just outside of town facing the Mediterranean on the other side of the peninsular, gave credence to understanding why the rich and famous adopted the town for their summer pleasure ground.

It also left us wondering how it would compare with the big casino cities further east on the Côte d’Azur proper, Nice, Cannes and Monte Carlo. But they would have to wait for our visit; before that we wanted to get a picture of everyday Provençal life, away from the razzamatazz of commercialized tourism, and for the next few days we concentrated our explorations on the many beautiful old villages to be found in the rolling countryside of Var and up into the hills towards Gorges du Verdon. . .

Lyon – part five – City of Silk

During the Renaissance, Lyon became very active in the silk trade and this resulted in the city becoming an important industrial town during the 19^th century. The main silk district is on the steep slopes of Croix Rousse, uphill from our house of learning at L’Inflexyon. We walked up the many steps one evening and at the top found a neighbourhood very different from where we were staying at Les Toits de Lyon; it appeared to be quite working-class and not ‘posh’ at all, as we had thought it might have been, being in such a wonderful location with such great views over the city. We were too late in the day to visit the two or three old silk factories that remain open to the public, so, after a brief wander around, we trotted back down the long wide ‘staircase’ of Montée de la Grande-Côte, and into more familiar territory.

However, we did come across other reminders of the silk-trading past of the city during our wanderings at other times. Several small boutiques in an area close to the Opera, such as La Boutique Ineska, were displaying some simply beautiful diaphanous silk dresses which looked wonderful when modeled by my long-limbed bride; in another gallery we visited, we were able to see the process of silk screen printing that produced the wonderful patterns of those garments; and in a small shop on rue de Boeuf, Brochier Soieries 1890, La Boutique, we received, from the very accommodating proprietor, a fascinating demonstration of a small version of the Jacquard machine, invented in 1801, that automated the weaving of the gorgeous patterns in silk that we associate with furnishing fabrics and the richer materials used in the aristocratic gowns and cloaks of old.

The silk industry is also associated with some of the more unusual features of Lyonnaise architecture. With the older parts of the city being built on and around fairly steep hills, most of the main streets of old Lyon run across the slopes, rather than up and down them. To give people living and working on the upper slopes easier direct access to the river, the famous traboules, a series of arched walkways, underground passages and staircases leading down the slopes, were incorporated into the buildings. Whilst there were lots of these traboules, not that many are nowadays easily accessible to the public, especially the underground tunnels which are now mostly closed off and used for storage.

All the same, we were lucky enough in our choice of learning establishment, to find ourselves directly next-door to a fine example of this style of construction;

Passage Thiaffait starts with stairs down from rue Burdeau and ends up opening onto rue René Leynaud. Several of the really rather elegant staircase traboules can also be seen on and around rue du Boeuf (such as La Tour Rose) and rue Saint-Jean in Vieux Lyon. Although we didn’t pursue our research into traboules any further, we came across several guidebooks and many websites dedicated to the subject [www.lyontraboules.net].

And the connection of traboules with the silk trade was . . . ? They provided safe and efficient passage for silk workers to get their wares to and from market unmarred [www.atlasobscura.com/places/traboules-secret-passages].

Lyon – part four – A smörgåsbord of museums

Our time in Lyon was much more than language learning, food and markets. Among the seemingly limitless attractions in Lyon, we spent many enjoyable hours visiting just a sample of its wonderful museums.

At the ultra-modern end of the scale, there is the excellent Musée des Confluences. Built on reclaimed land at the point where the rivers Rhône and Saône come together, this highly futuristic, stainless steel and glass edifice houses a permanent four part exhibit on the Ascent of Man – Origines, Espèces, Sociétés and Éternités – as well as temporary exhibits, all of which were well designed, and beautifully presented. We hadn’t expected to spend the whole afternoon there but the combination of La Dance Moderne – a well choreographed series of videos and music on screens throughout a large hall, and an Exploration of the Antarctic with some quite amazing underwater film footage of penguins and seals, meant we had little time left for Les Chaussures de la Monde and Potieres d’Afrique, before grabbing a quick coffee and a snack in the unusual – unusual for France that is – self-service cafe, before the museum doors were locked behind us, and it was time to take the tram back to Place Bellecour.

The comprehensive and extensive system of trams and buses and underground trains operated by Metro de Lyon is another aspect of Lyon that makes the city so easy to explore. Although we walked most of our time there, we did take a tram and the underground a couple of times and found them comfortable and clean, and more importantly, on schedule. To get a better feel for the city as early as we could, on our first weekend we also made use of the hop-on/hop-off City Tour Bus. This really came into its own, for your scribe’s old knees at least, after a long, tiring, but fascinating walk around the amazingly ornate late nineteenth century La Basilique Notre Dame de Fourvière and the two beautifully preserved Roman theatres right next door.

The Fourvière hill was where the first Christian community was created in the country of Gaul. The hill’s dedication to the Virgin Mary supposedly saved the old city from the ravages of the Black Death in the fourteenth century, as well as the cholera epidemic in 1832 and the Prussian invasion in 1870; sceptics please remain silent! Certainly the marvellous view of the city from the top of the hill makes any pilgrimage to the Basilica very worthwhile.

One of three entertainment-oriented museums that we found really interesting was the Musée Lumière that we visited with our fellow students, as one of the cultural events arranged by Inflexyon, the language school we attended during our first couple of weeks in the city. Housed in the majestic Villa Lumière on the appropriately named rue du Premier-Film, in the Monplaisir district of the 8e arondissement, this fine collection pays homage to the brothers Louis and Auguste Lumière, and describes their invention and development of the ‘moving picture’. The exhibits include several of the first movies ever made, on subjects as diverse as the children at family gatherings, steam trains passing through Lyon station, young men doing physical jerks and some classic slap-stick comedy routines. There was also a fine selection of their very early camera equipment as well as some insights into their early experiments at colour photography and videography. This was particularly interesting to two people whose home is not very far from Hollywood, an address that may never have achieved its fame without the innovative thinking of the Lumière brothers!

To better understand the history and development of Lyon, we visited the Musée Gadagne in the St Jean quarter of Vieux Lyon. Located in the Hôtel Gadagne, the early sixteenth century home of the brothers Gadagne, the building houses two museums, La Musée de l’Histoire de Lyon and the aforementioned Musée des Marionettes du Monde. This latter whimsical exhibition celebrates the birth of the famous glove puppet, Guignol, and his comedic friends, Gnafron and Madelon, the predecessors of the Punch and Judy shows that many of us remember from our childhood. Guignol was the invention of Lyon resident Laurent Mourguet, an out-of-work silk weaver, turned peddler and tooth puller, who started ‘puppeteering’ to distract his tooth-aching customers from the early 19^th century terrors of primitive dentistry. Less entertaining, but of much greater historical interest, the story of Lyon is long and fascinating, going back to Roman times, and the history museum does it more than justice. Housed in the original Hotel Gadagne built by the Florentine family Gadagni in the early sixteenth century and, with a lot of stairs to climb between four floors of exhibits, it requires a fair degree of stamina and determination to see and read everything; however, the visit is well worth the effort. And, as a final reward, there is a very pleasant little cafe in a roof top garden, which in days gone by was a small urban vineyard.

Completing the portfolio of entertainment-oriented museums in this fascinating city, there is the unusual collection of exhibits that comprise le Musée Miniature et Cinéma, deux passions, deux collections, created by the American miniaturist Dan Ohlman. Housed in the celebrated seventeenth century Maison des Advocats, close to the St Jean Cathedral, this eclectic mix of bizarre, and fairly gruesome, cinematic props,

along with a collection of very impressive miniature models of house and shop interiors, both real and imagined, some of which have been used in major Hollywood movies, makes for an hour of fascination to satisfy all ages and interests.

If none of these museums strike a chord, art lovers can choose from the Musée des Beaux Arts, the Musée d’Art Contemporain and the Musée des Tissus et Musée des Arts Decoratifs, students of ancient history have the Musée de la Civilisation Gallo-Romaine adjacent to the two Roman theatres on Fourvière hill, booklovers might enjoy the Musée de l’Imprimerie, and budding anthropolgists should take in the Musée Africain de Lyon. A veritable smorgasbord for those who love displays of “all-things museum-related”, after all, in one way or another, there is a “museumist” in all of us – thank you www.museumist.com for that delightful confabulated word!