Musée des Tissus

Housed in an eighteenth-century mansion, this museum holds one of the world's richest collections of textiles, tracing the silk trade that made Lyon wealthy. Its galleries display fragments of Coptic, Byzantine, Persian and Chinese cloth alongside the sumptuous silks woven in the city itself. The collection was assembled by the local chamber of commerce to inspire working weavers. A distinctive detail is the array of woven pictures produced on Jacquard looms, technically astonishing textiles that reproduce paintings thread by thread.