Three days in Bergamo: everybody lands here for Milan and nobody looks up at the hill

Two nights inside sixteenth century Venetian walls, reached by funicular, with a serious art collection down on the plain and the Alps starting at the back door.

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Length
3 days, 2 nights
Where you stay
Bergamo
Places
6 across 3 days
OpenFreeMap © OpenMapTiles Data from OpenStreetMap

Bergamo's airport handles millions of passengers a year and calls itself Milan. Almost all of them get straight onto a coach and go, which means a walled hill town with Venetian gates, a Renaissance chapel of coloured marble and one of the best small picture galleries in Italy sits ten minutes from the terminal, largely to itself.

The town is in two halves and the split is the whole character of the place. The Città Alta is medieval, inside six kilometres of walls the Venetians built in the 1560s, on top of a hill, reached by a funicular that runs every few minutes. The Città Bassa below is nineteenth and twentieth century, where people actually live and work, and where the art gallery is.

Two nights is enough, and both of them should be up on the hill. The evening after the last funicular of day trippers has gone down is when the upper town belongs to the people who live in it.

Highlights

  • A tower bell that counts out a hundred strokes at ten every night, from the days when the gates shut
  • A chapel of pink and white marble built by a mercenary captain to house his own tomb
  • A church with no front door, entered through side porches held up by lions
  • Stuffed pasta dressed in nothing but butter, sage and bacon, which is what this region does instead of tomato

Where to stay

Bergamo, two nights

A Roman town that became a medieval commune and then spent nearly four hundred years as the westernmost outpost of Venice, which is why the lion of Saint Mark is carved over the gates and why the walls are so good: they were the front line of the republic's land empire.

The upper town has been left almost entirely alone since, because the modern city grew on the plain below rather than on the hill. It is one of the very few Italian hill towns that never had to be preserved on purpose.

Day by day

Day 1 in Bergamo

Up the funicular, and the old square

The funicular climbs through the wall and puts you out in a small sloping square where the medieval town starts. From there one street runs the length of the ridge, and everything is off it.

The main square is a hundred metres along: a Renaissance library on one side, a covered arcade on the other, and a twelfth century town hall on stone legs across the middle with a tower next to it. The tower still rings a hundred strokes at ten in the evening, which used to mean the gates were closing and now means the tourists have gone.

Do nothing else on the first evening except walk the walls. The circuit is a broad path on top of the Venetian ramparts, it runs almost all the way round, and it looks out over the plain towards Milan on one side and up into the Alpine foothills on the other.

  1. 16:00

    Piazza Mercato delle Scarpe

    Architecture

    The little square where the funicular arrives, once the shoe market, with the old road up from the plain arriving through a gate at one corner. Get your bearings here: everything in the upper town is within four hundred metres.

  2. 17:00

    Piazza Vecchia

    Architecture

    One of the finest small squares in Italy, and best at night when it is lit and empty. Climb the tower for the roofs and the walls, and stay for the ten o'clock bell.

  3. 20:00

    Casoncelli and a glass of Valcalepio

    Eat

    Stuffed pasta with butter, sage and pancetta, in one of the places on the ridge street. Book at a weekend; walk in on a weekday.

With more time: The walk along the top of the walls is free and always open, and it is the thing people remember about Bergamo. The stretch on the southern side catches the sunset over the plain.

Day 2 in Bergamo

The church, the chapel, and the fortress

Behind the town hall is a cluster of buildings that is the reason to come. The church at the centre of it was begun in the twelfth century and has never been given a front: the entrances are side porches on red marble columns with lions at the base, and it is disorientating until you work out that the neighbouring buildings were simply built too close.

Inside it is a complete change of century, hung with Flemish tapestries and lined with inlaid wooden panels designed by Lorenzo Lotto, who spent years in this town. Donizetti, born a few streets away, is buried in the left aisle.

The chapel attached to the side is a separate thing again. A mercenary captain called Colleoni, who commanded the Venetian armies and made a fortune doing it, knocked down a sacristy without permission in the 1470s and built a mausoleum for himself in pink, white and black marble, carved all over. His tomb is inside under a gilded equestrian statue of himself.

In the afternoon walk up to the fortress at the eastern end of the ridge, which is a museum of the town's nineteenth century and, more to the point, a park on the top of a hill with the whole valley below.

  1. 09:30

    Santa Maria Maggiore

    Religious

    Free, and darker and stranger than the square outside suggests. Look for the wooden choir panels, which are covered when not in use, and ask if they are showing them.

  2. 10:45

    Colleoni Chapel

    Religious

    The marble front is the show and it is worth ten minutes standing in front of it before going in. The ceiling frescoes are eighteenth century, three hundred years later than the building, and somehow they work.

  3. 12:30

    Lunch on the ridge

    Eat

    Polenta with something braised, in a place with a terrace off the main street. Or a filled focaccia from a bakery and a bench on the walls.

  4. 14:15

    Rocca

    Historic

    A walled stronghold at the top of the town with a park of oaks around it and artillery pieces parked among them. The museum is modest; the terrace and the view of the Alps behind the town are the reason to climb.

With more time: The second funicular runs from the western gate up to a hamlet on the hill above, where there are the remains of a castle, a couple of restaurants and a path along the ridge into the countryside. Ten minutes each way and the best view of the walled town from outside it.

Day 3 in Bergamo

The lower town, and the pictures

Go down for the last morning. The lower town is a grid of nineteenth century streets with an early twentieth century civic centre in the middle of it, and one very good reason to be there.

The Accademia Carrara was left to the city by a collector in the eighteenth century and has been growing since: Bellini, Mantegna, Botticelli, Raphael, Pisanello, Titian and a whole room of Lorenzo Lotto, hung in a restored building with space around the paintings and hardly anybody in the rooms. Two hours, comfortably.

The airport bus and the trains to Milan both go from the same square below, so leaving is easy.

  1. 09:45

    Accademia Carrara

    Culture

    Start on the top floor with the fifteenth century and work down. The Bellini Madonnas and the Lotto portraits are the reason people who care about painting make the trip up from Milan.

  2. 12:15

    Stracciatella, then the bus

    Eat

    The flavour was invented in this town and the place that did it is on the ring road at the foot of the hill. Then ten minutes to the station or twenty to the airport.

With more time: The modern art gallery directly opposite the Carrara puts on temporary shows that are usually more ambitious than a city this size would suggest, and the two together make a full morning if your flight is late.

Before you go

Where to stay

In the upper town. It is small, walled and beautiful, it has plenty of small hotels in old buildings, and the evenings are the reason to be here. The lower town is cheaper and duller and connected by a funicular that runs late.

Bags on cobbles and a funicular queue are the only complication, and the funicular takes luggage without trouble. If you are flying in and out of the airport, note the bus goes to the lower town and you change there.

Getting around

The funicular from the lower town to the upper takes two minutes, runs constantly, and uses the same ticket as the buses. A second funicular continues from the edge of the upper town up to a hilltop village above it, which is worth the fare for the view alone.

Everything within the walls is on foot, on stone, and pleasantly closed to traffic. Milan is under an hour by train, which makes Bergamo a plausible base for a longer trip and a very easy day out from Milan in the other direction.

Timing

Nothing needs booking. The upper town gets very busy on summer weekends and at lunchtime, and is empty at eight in the morning and after nine at night, so plan the walking for those hours.

The picture gallery in the lower town closes on Tuesdays and reopened after a long restoration, so it is in unusually good condition and still not crowded.

Eating

Bergamo is butter and polenta country, at the point where Lombard cooking starts turning Alpine. Casoncelli, a stuffed pasta dressed with melted butter, sage and crisp pancetta. Polenta taragna, dark with buckwheat and stirred with cheese until it will hold a spoon upright. Braised meats, and a lot of cheese from the valleys behind the town.

Ice cream is worth a paragraph of its own here, because stracciatella, vanilla with a broken thread of chocolate through it, was invented in this city in 1961 and the shop that did it is still on the ring road below the walls.

The strange thing about Bergamo is how completely it is skipped. Ten minutes from a runway used by half of Europe there is a walled town with Venetian gates that goes quiet at nine in the evening.

Take the funicular up, stay two nights, and walk the walls twice.

Or make it a longer trip

These trips pass through here on the way somewhere else.

Make it your trip

Every stop, day and place here lands in your account as an editable trip. Move the days around, swap a city, add your own bookings and costs, and share it with whoever is coming.

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Common questions

Is Bergamo a day trip from Milan or a stay?
It works as a day trip, under an hour each way, and it is much better as two nights. Everything that makes the upper town special happens before ten in the morning and after eight at night, and a day trip gets you neither.
Should I stay here instead of Milan?
If you are flying into the airport and want somewhere calmer and cheaper, yes, and the train into central Milan is straightforward. If your trip is mostly about Milan itself, no: the last connections back are early enough to shape your evenings.
Upper town or lower town?
Sleep and eat in the upper town, and go down for the picture gallery and the shops. The only reason to base yourself in the lower town is price.
What is there beyond the two towns?
Valleys. The Brembana and Seriana run north into the mountains behind the city, with cheese making, walking and small ski resorts, and Lake Iseo, the least visited of the big lakes, is under an hour away. All of it needs a car or patience with buses.
When should I come?
April to June and September to October. The plain is humid in high summer and foggy in winter, but the hill sits above the fog often enough that a clear cold day here can be spectacular, with the Alps sharp on the horizon.