Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon

Housed in a former Benedictine convent on Place des Terreaux, this is one of the largest fine-art collections in France outside Paris. Its galleries span antiquities, medieval sculpture, and paintings from the Renaissance through Impressionism, with strong holdings of works by regional and European masters. Visitors move through vaulted cloister rooms arranged around a quiet inner garden dotted with Rodin bronzes. The seventeenth-century architecture is itself part of the appeal, and a wing traces Lyon's silk-weaving wealth.