Bergamo

Greenville friends, here is your sister city, seen from a height of 248 steps.

I re-counted them on the way down the Campanone tower, too.  But I’m now unsure whether I memorized 248 or 284.  We tried to send you this message when we were there, but it seems not to have gone; scusami if this is a repetition.

Bergamo is two cities: the Città Alta on a craggy hill along the foot of the pre-Alps that form the northern border of the Lombardy plain, and the Città Bassa sprawling out into that plain.  Alta means “high,” not “old,” but it is old as well as high.

We arrived in a curious way.  The bus from the railway station left us part way up a long road sloping westward up the face of the mountain.  Someone using a phone app had determined that this was nearest to where we wanted to go.  It was a deserted spot, but there was a bus stop there because across from it was a small portal through the city wall – the southern side of the massive walls thrown around the city under Venetian rule.  We went through this gate and up a series of stepped cobbled alleys, to a space where were people, who told us, “Yes, you can go through the church.”  We went on up through another door and were inside the vast Basilica, and going around its pews and out by the north door we found ourselves in the central Piazza Vecchia, surrounded by this and other monumental buildings, and bordered on the north by the main street.

We lodged in a place rambling back from a restaurant on a corner of street and piazza, and could recommend it, though at the time it was even more complicated because of construction work that meant another roundabout entry.

If we had stayed on the bus, it would have brought us up to the castle-like structures at the western tip of the old city.  Up that comes the funicular or cable car, which is probably the way in that you’d want to use.  Funiculars or sets of escalators or elevators, I’ve seen them also at Perugia and Orvieto and Urbino and Como, it seems there has been a wave of fitting them into Italian hilltop cities, and their great construction cost is no doubt paid for by the gift shops they make you pass through.

Berg is German for “mountain.”  (English-speakers tend to confuse it with Burg, “fortress.”  Whereas the latter root appears in English words and place names such as borough, burgher, bourgeois, Edinburgh, not to mention hamburger, and Pleasantburg, the ugly former name of Greenville, South Carolina, I  don’t think berg has any reflection in English other iceberg and now fatberg.)

So was Bergamo named “mountain town” by the Lombards (Langobardi, “long-beards”), the Germanic tribe who invaded Italy in 568 AD and eventually settled in the plain called Lombardy?  No.  It was founded during the earlier stage when northern Italy was inhabited by Celtic people and the Romans called it Cisalpine Gaul.  A tribe called the Cenomani founded the town on the hill in 49 BC and their name for it was rendered in Latin as Bergomum.  The similarity to the Germanic word is presumably a coincidence.

Though the Lombards lost their Germanic language under Roman rule, there is still a language called Lombard, one of the varieties in northern Italy transitional between Italian and French, and it has a dialect called Bergamasque.

And there are several kinds of plant called bergamot.  One is a beautiful little wildflower that I once planted in a bare muddy spot beside where I used to take my picnic on the far side of the lake in the Furman University campus, hoping it would take hold and spread.  I’m afraid it didn’t.

Bergamo is pronounced with the stress on the first syllable.  My Greenville friend Leo Diamantstein with his Italian background used to laugh at mispronunciations, but I confess I used to find it not easy to remember.  I probably also ought not to say this, but Italian cities seem to have wider families.  Bergamo has five other sister cities besides Greenviille.

Nevertheless I’ll bet you had a warm welcome if you took part in an exchange visit – I’d like to hear about it.

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