How Was Bergamo Built

The Venetian walls are the defining structure and a piece of Renaissance military engineering rather than medieval fortification: low, thick, angled bastions designed to absorb cannon fire and to cover each other. Six kilometres of them survive complete, with four gates, and the top is a public walk.

Inside, the upper town is dense and medieval, built in local stone on streets that follow the contour rather than a grid. The Piazza Vecchia holds a twelfth-century communal hall — among the oldest civic buildings in Italy, and confusingly sharing its name with a grander one in Padua — and the Campanone, whose bell still rings a hundred times at ten in the evening, the old signal to close the gates.

Santa Maria Maggiore is the strange one: a twelfth-century Romanesque basilica with no main door on its front, because the Colleoni Chapel was built against it in 1476. Bartolomeo Colleoni, a mercenary commander in Venetian service, demolished a sacristy to make room and had the chapel faced in pink and white marble; the contrast with the plain basilica beside it is the point.

The lower town was substantially replanned in the 1920s around broad avenues and a new civic centre, which is why the two halves of Bergamo look like different centuries as well as different heights.