Bergamo: the Upper Town and Venetian walls

Sharply divided between nineteenth-century Lower Town and the medieval Upper Town perched on the hillside, Bergamo preserves one of Europe's best-preserved Venetian walls, a UNESCO heritage site since 2017.

The 1887 funicular railway connects the two parts of the city in minutes.

The Venetian Walls, over six kilometers of fifteenth-century fortifications built by the Venetian Republic, can be walked entirely, offering views of the Po Valley on one side and the Orobica Prealps on the other.

Piazza Vecchia, called by Le Corbusier among Europe's most beautiful squares, adjoins the thirteenth-century Palazzo della Ragione to the Civic Tower, which still sounds one hundred bell strokes each evening in memory of the ancient curfew.

The Colleoni Chapel, a Renaissance masterpiece in polychrome marble commissioned by the condottiero Bartolomeo Colleoni, houses his personal mausoleum next to the Basilica of Saint Mary Major.

The Accademia Carrara, in the Lower City, displays works by Botticelli, Raphael, and Lorenzo Lotto in one of Lombardy's most important painting collections outside Milan.

The hundred evening bells of the Civic Tower, once designed to signal the closing of the city gates, continue to ring today though no gate truly closes anymore.

The Venetian Walls, built to defend that same city, ultimately became the most beautiful way to look at it from outside, strolling rather than under siege.