In the June light of Northern Italy, the bliss of Bergamo
Afew years ago, I decided that the best time to go to Europe was June. It was mostly because everywhere we might visit, the local population was still at work, at school, at home, and it would be easier to sneak around, pretending not to be a tourist. When we decided to go to Bergamo, we intended to stay for a day or two, part of a mini tour of northern Italy, before visiting friends in Lake Como, but once we got there, we couldn’t leave.
It was a lesson in being unprepared, in having bought the guidebook, but not having read it, in discovering for yourself what you soon realize millions of lucky travellers have discovered before you.
Bergamo is exactly where the lush, well-watered plains of northern Italy meet the Alps. The hotel we had found online was above the Città Alta, the original walled city, overlooking a deep valley full of fruit trees, grass and flower beds that benefit from 45 inches of annual rainfall, about 30 inches more than the Carmel Valley in California, where we live.
The first evening we were there, we ambled down a two-lane road carved into the hillside, toward Il Pianone, a well-known restaurant in the area that specializes in a fusion of traditional Tuscan and Bergamasque cuisine. The June light was cool and transparent, and the plants and trees we passed amazed me - apple trees, full of tiny fruits, rooted in hillsides so steep that I couldn’t imagine crawling down them to harvest the abundant crop; and hollyhocks 12 or 16 feet tall, reaching to the top of the stone wall along the road from a neat flower garden planted beside an equally neat vegetable garden full of lettuce, peas and spinach.
Il Pianone, which occupies a structure that was built over the ruins of a fortress, was obviously a popular place. It was full; every night we were there, six in all, the restaurant hosted a party, a wedding or a conference. The food was delicious and the wine cellar, which once was the powder magazine in the fortress, was impressive, but what I remember best is the surrounding gardens. Those in front flowed down the hillside, bursting with petunias, geraniums and flowering shrubs. A path lined with pots of blooming fragrant roses led to the one behind the restaurant that looked out to distant peaks, across the wide valley, over the roads and the city, toward the south and east. It was filled with the most beautiful hydrangeas I have ever seen, the plants tall and thick, the flowers many shades of pink, deep purple and blue. We wandered through the rich grass, and the hardest decision was, look at the blossoms or look at the vista?
Each morning we walked from our hotel past the botanical garden up the hill to one side and a pasture down the hill, where a few donkeys and horses were grazing, and entered the Città Alta from the northeast through Porta Sant’Alessandro. There are three other gates, the largest, at the southeast corner, is the Porta San Giacomo, constructed entirely of marble. The Città Alta may be the best preserved and most self-contained walled city in Europe. The site has been continuously settled for thousands of years, first by the Celts, then the Romans, who gave the area the name Bergomum. In the sixth century, it became part of the Lombard kingdom and was, for many years (starting in the early 10th century), the site of a bustling fair where local merchants traded goods with merchants from Germany, Switzerland and England, as well as Milan and Parma. In 1428, it became part of the Venetian Republic, then, in 1797, as an effect of the Napoleonic wars, revolted against Venice and declared its independence. The walls were built in the 16th century.
For my purposes, amid the delightful weather, the history was something to note (once I opened my guidebook) as a series of passing moments when a man or a woman walking along - even Giuseppe Garibaldi, whose forces entered through Porta San Lorenzo to the northeast in 1859 - must have stopped, looked around and given thanks to be here in this spot.
But a walled city can be dangerous, and in the mid-19th century, the Città Alta experienced a serious cholera epidemic. Instead of tearing down the walls or refurbishing the site, the city rebuilt itself down the mountain, at what is now the Città Bassa (Lower Town), a modern commercial and industrial city full of shops, cars, restaurants, boulevards and trees. (In fact, the Oriocenter mall near the Bergamo airport is the largest in northern Italy, with 203 shops.) The Città Alta was left more or less intact, more or less connected to the surrounding fields and farms in a way that I haven’t seen elsewhere.
The buildings in the Città Alta have been refurbished, perhaps, but not remade. The shops are small, charming and individually owned. I had two favourites. At one that I wish I could remember the name of, I bought a neatly (and locally) made linen dress; the other, Lavanda di Venzone, was entirely devoted to a local crop, lavender, with lotions, soaps, perfumes, little dolls that are sachets - what drew me in was the scent billowing out the door as I passed.
Like every Italian city, Bergamo has museums, churches, piazzas and mysterious narrow streets. The Basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore was built in 1137, and Gaetano Donizetti, the composer of “Chi mi frena in tal momento,” the sextet from “Lucia di Lammermoor,” perhaps my favourite piece of classical music, was born in Bergamo. There is an opera festival dedicated to the composer at the Teatro Gaetano Donizetti, though it is in late November and early December, not when I visited in June. But there are plenty of spots to visit. The Accademia Carrara Museo was closed when we were there, but many of its 2,000 Renaissance to 18th-century paintings were on display at the Palazzo della Ragione (as were baskets of pink petunias hanging from the railing as we walked up the steps from the Piazza Vecchia, the cultural and mercantile center of the Città Alta).
I think my favourite place, though, was the Museo Storico de Bergamo, which is in a building with a tall cylindrical tower from the 14th century called the Rocca di Bergamo, originally a fortified castle that overlooks the Città Bassa and the valley to the southeast, simultaneously open and closed, protected but with a terrific view (and lots of informative displays, including a woolly mammoth mother and calf). Our favourite museum in the Città Bassa was the Galleria D’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Bergamo, which looks rather like a modern building, but was originally a 15th-century convent, and has a large and varied collection. We drove there, through the marble gate, but you can also go from the Città Alta to the Città Bassa by a short funicular trolley.
Mostly, the Città Alta was a perfect place to wander, since the streets are so narrow, on foot. There was something around every corner, including but not restricted to a wonderful lunch, a great view or a delightful shop. But we did drive into the mountains one afternoon, to San Pellegrino Terme, maybe the spookiest spot we visited, nearly 14 miles and about a hundred years away.
The “strada” (street) ran along the banks of the bubbling Brembo river, between steep, spring-green and beautiful mountains, reminding us that this is where the Italian peninsula is jammed up against the European continent, and that this movement is both slow and violent. The San Pellegrino bottling factory is outside of town; five minutes later, we saw why the water-bottling company was there - the old and boarded up Grand Hotel from the days when San Pellegrino Terme was a fashionable spa. We stopped and walked around for a bit, but there was something faded and tragic about the contrast between the town and the mountains, gardens and blue skies surrounding it. We hurried back to Bergamo.
Despite Bergamo’s long and sometimes difficult history, there seemed to be nothing lost or tragic about it. The piazzas, shops, museums, bistros and pasticcerias were bustling and friendly (not to mention full of delicious treats). The gardens were fertile and neatly trimmed. The grass and the breeze, the calls of people hailing their friends or ordering their antipasti, the flowers and the singing birds enchanted us. And then, as we walked up the road toward dusk, almost 9 p.m., there was the light, that long, cool June light that is ending while it seems as though it will never end.
At 66, I am maybe too old for a transformative travel experience, but thinking about where I have been (Greenland, Iceland, Kauai, 20 miles back into my home valley), I was reminded that if I got to pick one of those godly powers - omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent - I would certainly pick the last one, because every place has been full of amazement and pleasure.