Bergamo

Milan was only ever going to be a base of operations for me, the better to explore the surrounding areas. And so today I took my first day trip out to Bergamo, a 50 minute train journey away.

At first, Bergamo seems to be a pleasant and comfortable but fairly charmless little city. It has a grand avenue leading from the train station up to what looks like a small fort, way off in the distance. The avenue is busy with functional modern shops – pharmacies, small appliance stores, and fast food outlets. So far, so dull. But as you walk up the avenue, the land slowly rising in elevation, you begin to see that what looked like a small fort is actually just part of the old city wall of a sizable ancient town.

Eventually the avenue curves away to carry vehicular traffic up to the town, while pedestrians get a choice of slogging up a long series of steps or riding up in a funicular. Being a keen walker and also cheap, I took the steps. After all, how many stairs could there be?

 

I am so naive.

Getting up to the old city gates means climbing a lot of stairs, but no more than an ordinary person can handle. However, old Bergamo is built on a particularly craggy hill, and the ups and downs continue throughout the town. Every time I thought, “I wonder what’s around the next corner of this charming old city?”, the answer was, inevitably, more stairs.

 

At some point I topped out at the Rocca fortress, the highest point in the whole old town. From there, you can see the entire city, both old and new, and several neighbouring towns as well.: the medieval towers, the cathedrals, and the tiny dots of exhausted tourists trudging up the innumerable stairs.

 

I saw signs pointing towards botanic gardens, further cathedrals and other points of touristic interest, but when I noticed the number of extra stairs required to reach them, I realised that I am not sufficiently enamoured with trees, tacky Catholicism, or indeed anything else. You could have told me that Ursula Andress circa 1965 was at one of the cathedrals (unlikely) and was signing body parts (far more likely), and I’d have looked at the stairs and said, “I don’t think so”.

Oh, who am I kidding? I’d be up those stairs like a coked up Jack Russell, tearing the clothing off whatever body part I wanted her to use her sharpie on. But I’d resent her for it.

I completed my tour of the old town at a ristorante, where I had a half bottle of less than stellar local red wine and an ossobuco that tasted wonderful but looked like a dog had sicked all over a plate then been prevented from eating it again.

The menu was in Italian so I’m not sure what the two pale blobs are. One was probably polenta, and the other tasted sort of cheesy. It’s probably best to keep the mystery.

After lunch I took a different route down to the new town, a steep alleyway rather than the steps which was a little easier to traverse apart from the couple of times when a small car came barreling up, occupying 90% of the width of the alley, forcing me to press myself into the closest nook or cranny and pray for a quick Fiat-related death.

But I miraculously survived, and spent the rest of the afternoon window shopping and eating more gelato, as is my way. By the time I left Bergamo, I’d covered 23kms, according to my Garmin. It made no mention of how much of that was vertical, but judging by my sore legs, it was a lot.