Bergamo, a jewel to discover in Northern Italy

As promised, here's the post on my beautiful city: Bergamo.

Exactly at the center of Northern Italy, Bergamo is famous for its upper town, a hilltop medieval town surrounded by defensive walls built in the 16th century and recongnized as a Unesco World Heritage site in 2017: the Venetian Walls are really impressive, with their 4 gates, 14 bastions, 2 platforms, 2 armouries and 100 embrasures for cannons. Walking inside the Walls will leave you breathless: from there you can have an overall view of the lower town, the most of the province of Bergamo and, if weather conditions allows it, you could also see Milan.

The upper town is one of the main tourist attractions of the city and can be reached by a funicular which has been connecting with the city center for more than 120 years: but everyday also the “bergamaschi” spend a lot of time in this part of the city which also hosts the University.

The lower town, instead, can be considered as the modern centre: here you can find Bergamo's city hall, several boutiques, shops, cafes and the art galleries Accademia Carrara (see the pic) and Gamec (Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art).

The city is served by Il Caravaggio International Airport (called Milan-Bergamo BGY), the third busiest italian airport with over 12 milion passengers in 2017 and the main Ryanair's italian hub: its growth has assured the city and its surroundings of a continuous influx of tourists.

Here on 5th August 2016 a cargo plane has overshot the runway and crashed into a road due to bad weather conditions: fortunately nobody has been hurt in the crash.

The Province of Bergamo has a population of 1.112.187 and an area of 2.754 square kilometers: it extends from the Orobian Alps and the valleys Seriana, Brembana, Cavallina, Imagna to the Iseo Lake, made famous in the world by the site-specific work of art by Christo and Jeanne-Claude.

The installation consisted of 70.000 square meters of yellow fabric, carried by a modular floating dock system of 226.000 high-density polyethylene cubes resting on the water and it had attracted 1.2 milion visitors in 3 weeks who felt they were walking on water.

The last thing I want to do is talking about the local cuisine: typical of our tradition are the "Casoncelli alla Bergamasca", stuffed ravioli with a mixture of bread crumbs, egg, parmesan, ground beef and sausage, served with melted butter flavored, sage leaves and bacon cubes: delicious!

I hope this short story has intrigued you. My advise is: visit Bergamo!