Bergamo Events

Bergamo’s calendar is dominated by one autumn festival, with a few smaller civic and seasonal fixtures around it.

The Donizetti Opera festival, November to December

Several weeks devoted to the composer born here in 1797, staged at the Teatro Donizetti and other venues. The programme deliberately includes operas that are rarely performed anywhere, which is why it draws a specialist audience internationally. It is also the busiest the city’s hotels get outside the summer.

Sant’Alessandro, 26 August

The city’s patron saint, a Roman soldier executed here according to tradition, marked at the cathedral that carries his name. It falls when much of the city is away, which makes it a smaller and more local occasion than its status suggests.

The Campanone, every night

Not an event but a fixed point: the great bell in Piazza Vecchia rings a hundred times at ten in the evening, the signal that once closed the city gates. It has been doing so for centuries and is worth being in the square for.

Seasonal rhythms

The Val Seriana and Val Brembana run a ski season from roughly December to March, and the same valleys hold summer walking festivals and cheese fairs in late summer and autumn. Bergamo itself largely closes in the middle two weeks of August.

Rooms are hardest to find during the Donizetti festival; the rest of the year the constraint is flight schedules rather than tourism.