It was a cold night in Lyon and I was feeling inspired. “Black pudding,” I said to my companion. “It unites the world. It’s a speciality here as well as in Lancashire and, as I recall, the West Indies.”

“Other places too!” stammered the well-travelled companion, wobbling. We had just come from a dinner of shipping quantities of black pudding and Beaujolais. France’s second city was suddenly showing unsuspected depths.

The truth is, I’ve rarely looked to Lyon for inspiration. Yet, that night, the evidence was before me. Lyon could inspire. And, as becomes clear, not just with black pudding. In early December, the city puts on party clothes for Europe’s greatest urban light show. It has not one but two international-class rivers, a Renaissance quarter on an Italian scale, and more art and culture than any normal person could possibly need. It is, in short, a terrific spot for a winter break: here are our 10 good reasons for going to Lyon right now.

1 Lighting up From December 6 to 9, the Festival of Lights challenges the winter night, draping classical facades and courtyards, bridges and statues, rivers and squares with colour, moving shows and cascades of illumination. It is as if the entire serious city had taken a tab of mind-altering drugs. But it’s also heaving. So, daft as this will sound, it may not be the best moment for a first visit – especially as Lyon is also gloriously, if more soberly, lit in normal times. I’m sure the lights caressing the Palais de la Bourse had something to do with my black-pudding revelation.

2 Dressing up Here is a Parisian abundance of fashion stores, but in more manageable form. Top-end designers gather around Place des Célestins on the central Presqu’île peninsula, between the two rivers. I particularly liked the look of frothy items chez Nicolas Fafiotte, at 8 Rue du Plat.

Nearby, Rue de la République, the longest pedestrian street in France, has several zillion stores for the more realistic clothes-wearer, as does the parallel Rue Edouard Herriot. Foodies should head for the Halles marketplace, across the Rhône on Rue Garibaldi. Recently updated, it’s a marriage between a normal market and the Harrods food hall, and overwhelming if you’re hungry. Look out for charcuterie from Sibilia and Mère Richard’s cheeses. En route back to the centre, divert by Bernachon (42 Cours Franklin Roosevelt) for your luxury chocolate requirements.

3 Eating up Lyon reckons to be the capital of French gastronomy. To sustain the claim, it will send you off to Nicolas le Bec’s restaurant (Rue Grolée), Pierre Orsi (Place Kléber) or out to Paul Bocuse’s place at Collonges, where France’s culinary pope presides (and looks damned smug about it). But every city has posh places that require you to mortgage the children to pay for the soup.

The point of being in Lyon is to eat as the Lyonnais do, and always have. So head instead for the bouchons: small, neighbourhood restaurants usually with much wood, tables far too close together and food not as religion but as tie-loosening fuel for bonhomie. Try hot saucisson, chicken in vinegar or – yes! – the black puddings at Chez Hugon (12 Rue Pizay, near the town hall). Then tell me you don’t feel at one with the world and all its people. At £16, a full meal costs less than a starter in more self-righteous establishments, and you don’t have to fawn or be fawned upon.

4Traboules On the banks of the Saône, this is a huge and fantastic warren where, from the 16th century, silk-workers wove and Italian bankers looked after the cash. Bags of it. Enough to put up grand edifices and ochre townhouses with courtyards, loggias, the full Renaissance panoply. These days, the buildings are still colourful and jammed in tight, looking down like indulgent elders on the scurry of contemporary life. And you may still scuttle through their innards via public passages known as traboules. Just push the door at, say, 54 Rue St Jean. You’re padding through the intimacy of history.

5 Virgin Mary Take the funicular up to the Fourvière hill above Old Lyon. It’s where the city started, as Roman Lugdunum, and there’s an amphitheatre up there to prove it. There’s also, unrelatedly, the Notre Dame basilica, which can be seen from everywhere in Lyon. The city promised the church to the Virgin if She would stop the invading Prussians reaching Lyon in 1870. She obliged, though had She seen the resultant riot of Byzantine mosaics and gilt, She’d doubtless have waved the invaders through.

6 Silk Lyon’s wealth hung by a silken thread through to the 19th century, when silk workers moved from their Renaissance quarters to the Croix-Rousse hill across the Saône. This remains a distinct and engrossing workers’ town of tall buildings (to take several storeys’ worth of looms) and insurrectionary memories. Contemporary designers show off silk in the Passage Thiaffait and the Atelier de Soierie, Rue Puits-Gaillot.

7 Biennale An exhibition promising to “plunge into the illegibility of the contemporary extreme” is an exhibition for which I’d normally find a pressing alternative engagement. Astonishingly, though, the Lyon Biennale of Contemporary Art conspires to give artistic verbiage a good name. The main bit, inevitably in run-down industrial premises in a district under rehab, offers a perfectly bracing blast of installation works. I emerged little wiser about the “contemporary extreme” but had a lot of fun. Take the T1 tram to Montrochet, then walk to La Sucrière by the river – and see what you think. Until January 6.

8 Gestapo At the Centre for the History of the Resistance and Deportation, at 14 Avenue Berthelot, in the former Gestapo HQ where Klaus Barbie presided, displays, info and films (all with English translations) are set in recreated bunkers, wagons and back streets. Sombre and powerful, it pulls no punches – and, through to January 27, there’s an exhibition inspired by the life and work of Primo Levi, the finest chronicler of the holocaust.

9 Water There’s no great city without the running commentary of a great river. Lyon has it in stereo. The Saône flows before pastel-hued old silk-working premises apparently at ease in their new lives. Across the way, the Rhône has a grander audience still, of buildings expressing the city’s 19th-century confidence. They make you long for an era that doubted nothing, and said so with Corinthian columns.

10 Black puddings Or did I mention them already?

Travel brief

Getting there: by train, it takes between five and five and a half hours to reach Lyon from London, and costs from £149 return. Book through RailEurope (0870 837 1371, www.raileurope.co.uk ). Airlines serving Lyon include BMI (0870 607 0555, www.flybmi.com ), British Airways (0870 850 9850, www.ba.com ), EasyJet (www.easyjet.com ), Air France (0870 142 4343, www.airfrance.co.uk ) and Aer Lingus (0870 876 5000, www.aerlingus.com ).

Where to stay: the Cour des Loges (2-8 Rue du Boeuf; 00 33-4 72 77 44 44, www.courdesloges.com ; doubles from £171) for Renaissance splendour. Tighter budgets might seek the Globe & Cecil (21 Rue Gasparin; 04 78 42 58 95, www.globeetcecilhotel.com ; doubles from £110).

Tour operators: VFB (01452 716831, www.vfbholidays.co.uk ) has three nights, B&B, in a four-star from £255pp, including return rail travel from London. Or try the French Travel Service (0844 848 8843, www.f-t-s.co.uk ).

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