Bergamo
Discover Bergamo
A concise introduction to Bergamo, its geography, history and culture.
Introduction
Bergamo sits at the foot of the Alps about fifty kilometres north-east of Milan, and its defining feature is a division that is geographic, historical and social all at once.
The Città Alta occupies a hill and is entirely enclosed by sixteenth-century Venetian walls, six kilometres around and walkable in full. Inside is a compact medieval and Renaissance town centred on the Piazza Vecchia, with narrow streets, a bell tower that still rings a curfew, and about three thousand residents.
The Città Bassa below is the working city: broad nineteenth- and twentieth-century avenues, the railway station, the shops and most of the hundred and twenty thousand people who live here. It also holds the Accademia Carrara, the city’s major art gallery.
Two funiculars climb the hill — one from the lower town to the upper, another from the upper town further up to San Vigilio — and they are public transport rather than rides.