Points of interest

The city of Bergamo is replete with an incredible array of monuments, starting with the iconic Piazza Vecchia, where the newly renovated Fontana Contarini (Contarini Fountain) is to be found, the Angelo Maj Library, the Palazzo della Ragione, and the Torre Civica (Civic Tower), a bell tower, locally known as the Campanone, which chimes one hundred times every evening at 10 o’clock to keep a medieval tradition alive: it used to warn the local inhabitants that the four access doors to the Città Alta were about to close.

When in Bergamo, it’s well worth taking the time to discover the wonderful Basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore with the Cappella del Colleoni (Colleoni Chapel) and Piazza Duomo, all of which can be found just behind Palazzo della Ragione. The Basilica is a Romanesque-Lombard church with a Baroque interior and an intarsia, depicting biblical scenes, created by Lorenzo Lotto. And that’s not all, there’s also an imposing Baroque confessional carved by Andrea Fantoni that dominates the beginning of the left aisle. The church, among its many treasures, also houses the tomb of the musician Gaetano Donizzetti who was born in Bergamo in 1797, and after whom the city’s main theatre is named.

And if you head down from the Città Alta via its many streets and scorlazzini (the local word used for the many sets of steps that link the Città Alta and the Città Bassa), you’ll absolutely not want to miss a visit to the Accademia Carrara, one of Italy’s foremost art galleries. For more than two hundred years, the gallery has collected and housed the works of great painters such as Lotto, Botticelli, Titian, Palma Vecchio, Canaletto, Hayez and many more, with over 1,800 fabulous pieces now on display. Directly opposite is the GAMeC, the Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea: because Bergamo has also collected an incredible array of pieces by modern and contemporary talents.

The Città Bassa has a very particular urban layout: it derives from the development of a number of villages situated along the main communication routes which, coming down from the hills, led into the plain: Borgo Canale, Borgo Sant’Alessandro, Borgo San Leonardo, Borgo Pignolo, Borgo San Tomaso, Borgo Santa Caterina, Borgo Sant’Antonio and Borgo Palazzo. The district that now forms the centre of the city was created in the early 1900s, this is where institutional buildings such as the City Hall, the Police Headquarters, the Provincial Headquarters and the central post office are located. The main artery running through Città Bassa is viale Papa Giovanni XXIII – formerly viale Roma – which runs from the city’s train station to Porta Nuova. Running across this main thoroughfare is the Sentierone, the paved avenue which has recently undergone a stylish makeover but which in centuries gone by was a staging post for horse-drawn carriages, today it is considered to be the most elegant area of the city. The Sentierone also runs across the front of the aforementioned Teatro Gaetano Donizzetti and leads up to the Chiesa dei Santi Bartolomeo e Stefano, which is officiated by Dominican friars and houses the Pala Martinengo by Lorenzo Lotto.

This is Bergamo in a nutshell: a city steeped in history, culture, remembrance and tradition that happily coexists alongside modernity and urbanization.