Lyon

Lyon is organised around two things almost nobody mentions in the same breath: silk and eating. The canuts — the silk weavers of the Croix-Rousse — built the tall-windowed workshops that still line the hill, revolted twice in the 1830s, and left the city a network of covered passageways, the traboules, cut through private buildings so a bolt of silk could cross a block without getting wet. The food culture came out of the same century by a different door: the mères lyonnaises, women who cooked in bourgeois houses and then opened their own, taught the city that a restaurant could be a small, loud room with one person's name on it. The bouchon is what that turned into, and there is a label — a Gnafron puppet on the door — because there are more imitations than originals.