Bergamo Geography

Bergamo stands where the Po plain ends and the Alps begin, on an isolated hill of conglomerate rock rising about a hundred and twenty metres above the flat ground. That hill is the entire reason the city exists in this shape: it was defensible, and it commanded the point where two valleys open onto the plain.

Those valleys — the Val Brembana to the north-west and the Val Seriana to the north-east — run up into the Orobie Alps, which reach almost three thousand metres. The mountains are visible from the upper town on a clear day and are close enough to be a weekend, not an expedition.

South of the city the land is entirely flat, intensively farmed and industrialised, and in winter it holds fog. One of the more striking things about the Città Alta is that it frequently sits above that fog while the lower town is inside it.