“A French town ... in which the product of successive ages, not without lively touches of the present, are blended together harmoniously, with a beauty _specific_—a beauty cisalpine and northern—and of which Turner has found the ideal in certain of his studies of the rivers of France, a perfectly happy conjunction of river and town being of the essence of its physiognomy.”—_Deny L’ Auxerrois_: _Walter Pater._
Many centuries ago, certain chieftains of the Allobroges were inspired to plant their little village of Cularo at the supremely strategic point of all southern Gaul. They built it a trifle to the East of the meeting place of two rivers, the Isère and the torrent of the Drac; north of them stretched the high, unbroken wall of the lower Alps. And there in the sheltered valley they lived and were protected against incursions of other more warlike tribes—until the great conqueror of the world poured its invincible legions over the mountain barriers, and Rome seized the little Allobrogian defence town to be a colonial outpost of considerable military importance. On the site of Cularo sprang up the strongly fortified Gratianopolis, thus called in honor of the Emperor Gratian who reinforced the walls begun by Diocletian and Maximian. Later, with the decline of the Roman power and the development of the Frankish nation, the Latin name was abbreviated to Grenoble—by which the modern city is known to-day as the chef-lieu of the department of the Isère in France.
The town, from its birth to the end of the sixteenth century, was familiarly styled “_la ville du pont_,” the city of the bridge. For more than a thousand years it commanded the only point where it was possible to cross the river Isère. It was also designated “the old Roman route town,” for it lay on the natural highroad which linked Italy on the north with the country of France, the valley of the Po with that of the Rhone. The quaint, turreted bridge which spanned the river in mediæval days provided passage to the Alps from French soil, and was the gateway to France for strangers approaching over the mountains. While its strategic position in time of war must be apparent, the site of the city was no less vital to trade and to later industrial development. As early as 1615 Grenoble was known, far and wide, as “the city of glovers.”