Bergamo
UNESCO World Heritage Site (Venetian Works Of Defence Between The 16th And 17th Centuries, Inscribed 2017), Whose Bergamo Component Is The Circuit Of Venetian Walls Around The Upper Town · Bergamo, Lombardy
Bergamo is two towns stacked on top of each other, and almost everybody arriving at the airport goes straight past the good one. The lower town is nineteenth-century and ordinary; the upper town sits on a hill inside six kilometres of Venetian walls built in the 1560s, which were never once attacked and are therefore intact in a way almost no Renaissance fortification in Europe is. You get up there by funicular in three minutes. At the top is a square with a medieval town hall on stilts, a Romanesque basilica whose exterior gives no warning of the gilded riot inside, and next to it a chapel faced in coloured marble that is one of the strangest buildings in Lombardy. The walls themselves are the real pleasure: a continuous circuit you can walk the whole way round, looking down on the plain on one side and up into the Alps on the other. It is fifty minutes from Milan and a different country.
Piazza Vecchia, Bergamo, Lombardy, 24129, Italy
ALL TIMES UNVERIFIED FOR THIS ROW. Broadly: the walls, Piazza Vecchia and the streets of the upper town are public and never close. Santa Maria Maggiore and the Colleoni Chapel open daily with a long midday interval and shorter winter hours, and shut for services. The Campanone opens daily in season and at weekends only in winter. The funiculars run from early morning to late evening with reduced winter timetables and maintenance closures. The Accademia Carrara closes one day a week. The underground galleries open on guided dates only. Confirm before travelling.