We weren’t supposed to fall for Bergamo. It was a stopover. It turned out to be one of the finest places we’ve walked.
We arrived by train from Milan — a change of platform, a few hours to fill before the onward journey to Sirmione. We expected pleasant. We got something else entirely.
Bergamo Bassa, the lower city, earns your attention before you’ve even worked out where you’re going. Every corner produces something new. A grand colonnaded palazzo. A domed church appearing at a crossroads between the traffic. A park with a stone figure beneath a canopy of trees so green they almost hurt to look at. Sarah said it first: it reminded her of Lisbon. That feeling of a city that rewards every turn, where beauty isn’t saved for the famous squares but scattered freely through the streets.
It was only our second Italian city. After Busy Milan, we thought we had some measure of what Italy would feel like. Bergamo recalibrated everything.
The polenta cake came early — a Bergamo speciality, orange-flavoured, from one of the bakeries in the lower streets. We made a mental note to look for it again. Then we began moving uphill.
The route to Città Alta doesn’t require the funicular. You can walk it through cobbled lanes that narrow and steepen, past old stone walls thick with ivy and the smell of warm stone in the afternoon heat. We chose to march. It was genuinely hot. But there is something about arriving somewhere on foot that you can’t replicate any other way.
Porta Sant’Agostino is one of those things that earns a full stop. A Venetian city gate built to last centuries, flanked by the ancient walls, standing exactly as it has stood for five hundred years. You walk through it and something shifts.
Città Alta delivers immediately. The clock tower of the Torre Civica anchors the upper piazza, medieval stone against a pure blue sky. We found ourselves threading through covered passages — the Passaggio Torre di Adalberto carved into the old wall — and discovering quiet corners with stone fountains and classical figures looking out from their niches.
The Cappella Colleoni stopped us completely. The marble facade is extraordinary — geometric, ornate, layered — sitting alongside the Basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore as if the two buildings are having a quiet competition for the most intricate square metre. We stood and looked for longer than we probably admitted to each other.
The streets of the Alta were busy — a long medieval corridor packed with visitors, bakery windows loaded with pizza al taglio and brightly iced biscotti — but the city absorbs the crowd without losing itself.
We found a cloister — a roofless courtyard of Roman arches and faded brick, vivid green grass — and then a vaulted corridor where Sarah walked ahead toward the light at the far end, that particular light that only exists in old stone buildings at midday.
There was a second funicular, up to the Castello above. We looked at it. We decided we had given enough elevation to Bergamo for one afternoon. Maybe another time. Maybe a morning run if the legs are willing.
Instead, we walked the walls. The views from up here are the kind that make you stop altogether and just stand. The lower city spreads out below — terracotta rooftops and church domes stitched into a sea of green — with the Lombard plain stretching flat to the horizon and the Alps floating above it all in the haze.
We came down through different lanes and on the way back through the lower city stopped at BGY Gelato. Pink walls, neon signs, the airport code of Bergamo claimed proudly as a brand identity. It was exactly right for a warm afternoon at the end of a long walk.
Then the train, and onward to Sirmione and the lake.
Three hours. 4.8 miles. 484 feet of climbing. 10,326 steps. Bergamo was supposed to be a stopover. It turned out to be one of the finest places we’ve walked.