History
The name Dardilly may originate from the Gallo-Roman name Dardiliacus, if the town was founded in that period, but there is no historic proof for this hypothesis, although the remains of an aqueduct built by Claudius to bring the waters of the Brévenne River (a tributary of the Azergues, itself a tributary of the Saône) to Lyon have been found nearby. More likely, the name Dardilly originated at the time of its first surviving mention, in the 10th century cartulary of Ainay Abbey, which possessed several lands here.
In the Middle Ages, the village, constructed on a mound, was made up of a church dedicated to Saint Pancras, an adjacent cemetery and about twenty houses. In 1210, at the time of the feudal wars, the Count of Beaujeu tried to seize the city of Lyon and its then archbishop, Renaud II de Forez, fortified Dardilly as part of his defence of Lyon by building a wall and ditch around the existing settlement.
In the time of Jean-Marie Vianney - the late 18th and early to middle 19th centuries - Dardilly was an agricultural and wine-growing town, with some beautiful houses built by wealthy people from Lyons who spent the summer months here. The population was about 1500 inhabitants. At the end of the 19th century the vines were ravaged by phylloxera and many of the town's inhabitants left for Lyons to find work, bringing the population down to 982 in 1911. The vine-growers that remained went over to growing fruit.
In 1986 Pope John-Paul II visited Dardilly to see Vianney's birthplace on the occasion of the bicentenary of his birth.
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