La Longue Traboule

This guide to La Longue Traboule in Lyon starts with the well-worn legend that silk weavers, the canuts, used this five-courtyard passage to rush bolts of silk between workshop and merchant, keeping the fabric dry as it cut under four buildings. It sets that story against what historians actually know, from a linguist's doubts about the word traboule's origin to a historian's careful verdict on tales of Resistance fighters vanishing through passages like it. Stand in the second courtyard and look up, where Gothic vaulting runs straight into a Renaissance staircase.