Brescia and Bergamo — rediscovering Italy’s twin treasures

She is, they say, Brescia’s most beautiful woman. The Vittoria Alata, or Winged Victory: a statue two metres high, modelled in wax about 2,000 years ago, then cast in bronze and frozen in time.

Standing in her new home, she looks as if she might spring back to life. The folds of her toga, rumpled in the breeze, could unravel as she takes a step; the material clings to her flesh, hinting at her belly button and the swell of her hip as it slides down her shoulder. She stands there, one foot raised, arms stretched out, proffering something lost long ago, staring past me as inscrutable as the Mona Lisa.

It feels new to be seeing beauty in Brescia. In spring 2020, pictures coming out of the city and nearby Bergamo silenced the world. Coffins were piled high in warehouses and loaded on to army trucks; priests held mass funerals. This was Italy’s pandemic epicentre, and it was terrifying.

More than two years on from those indelible scenes, I want to see a different side of Brescia and Bergamo. The two — north-east of Milan, about 30 miles apart, Lake Iseo a blue crack in the green mountains rising north of both cities — have been named twin Italian Capitals of Culture for 2023. A pity vote, you might think, until you get there. Brescia has the kind of Roman remains that rarely exist north of Rome itself; Bergamo is a time capsule of the medieval and Renaissance periods. Together, they offer Italian history in a nutshell.

Not that tourists knew this until relatively recently — because not even the Bresciani themselves were too bothered. “We’ve always been an industrial city — it took a while to turn towards culture,” says guide Dario Cuzzovaglia, showing me around the Capitolium, or Capitoline Temple. Not for nothing does the name echo Rome. Ancient Brixia’s sprawling forum was set on a slope, crowned by this colossal, three-chapel temple built in gleaming local stone. That it is as impressive as those in the capital is thanks to Vespasian. In AD69, the Brixians supported the would-be emperor in his civil war for power. He won.

“As thanks, he told them, ‘I’ll give you a forum worthy of Rome,’” says Cuzzovaglia, gesturing to what today is a vast cobbled square, ringed by Renaissance palazzos on three sides and topped by the temple complex and a huge Roman theatre. Fluted columns rear up from an excavated patch on one side; below one of those buildings, Palazzo Martinengo, lie a Roman home and baths; and beyond the modern square is a building with Corinthian columns embedded in its walls and marble paving in the basement — the Roman basilica, or heart of government, now the headquarters of Brescia’s heritage ministry. Both buildings are open for visits.

Since December 2020, when she was moved from the sprawling Santa Giulia Museum nearby, the Vittoria Alata has stood in the Vespasian-built temple complex — in one of the three “chapels” dedicated to Jupiter, Juno and Minerva. In the opposite chapel is what Cuzzovaglia calls “the most precious floor in northern Italy”: diamond-shaped slabs of marble from across the empire, a lavish chequerboard of green, red, black and cream.

But beneath that is another temple — an earlier, Republican-era one, built over by Vespasian. This had four chapels — the standard Roman triumvirate plus one dedicated to (presumably) a local goddess. In 2015, the latter was opened to the public.

Down a staircase and through an acclimatisation chamber, we cross a terrazzo-style floor that wouldn’t look out of place in a modern Italian home, and enter the temple. On the outer wall are sculpted friezes of ox heads and garlands — pine cones and bunches of grapes — signifying sacrifices. Later, I notice those same pagan motifs on the Renaissance cathedral facade.

Two thousand years ago, this was as far as the public could go; but we glide through to the priests’ inner sanctum, where Brescia suddenly becomes Pompeii. We stand in a frescoed corridor, colours as bright as the day they were painted. Each faux marble panel has a different palette: violet-to-purple, rose-to-oxblood, lemon to mustard. Below them are fringed trompe-l’œil wall hangings, seemingly pegged by a thread in front of jade tiles and adorned with ribbons, garlands and flowers — all frescoed — between 3D stucco columns. Thin, barely visible white streaks along panel borders would have reflected candlelight as the priests paced the corridor, amping up the atmosphere, says Cuzzovaglia. The intimacy across the centuries is almost overwhelming.

The Bresciani may only recently have realised the value of their heritage, but now they’re embracing it. Down narrow medieval cobbled alleyways that feel miles from the city’s industrial reputation, I find Massenzio, a Roman-themed cocktail bar named after emperor Maxentius, which blends mixology with mythology. My cocktail flight is called Charon, and its Latin-named drinks arrive in a little wooden boat, echoing the mythical one that transported the Roman dead across the River Styx.

Where Brescia is at its most fascinating underground, Bergamo dazzles from on high. These neighbouring cities have similar histories: founded by Celts, conquered by Romans and, later, part of Venice’s Stato da Tera, or inland empire. But while Brescia sits at the foot of its hill, Bergamo’s historic centre, the Città Alta (High City), floats on a slim ridge overlooking the pancake-flat Po Valley and the Città Bassa (Low City), its modern overspill.

And while Brescia preserved much of its Roman heritage by shifting the city centre west, Bergamo’s space-limiting location means that it is layered like a lasagna. A staircase under the Venetian loggia in the main square leads me beneath the cathedral, where two Roman houses and the street between them were discovered by workmen installing a new heating system (the screen of an early cathedral, frescoed with rosy-cheeked saints, is built on top of them; together, they make the subterranean Museo della Cattedrale). On Via Bartolomeo Colleoni — Bergamo’s main street since Roman times, now sprinkled with artisan shops and bars — a flower-dotted mosaic lies beneath my feet as I try on high-fashion headbands hand-stitched from Missoni fabrics at Evelyne Aymon, run by the eponymous Evelyne and her daughter Fulvia.

Above ground, however, Bergamo is largely as it was in its Venetian period. La Serenissima acquired the city in 1428 — two years after Brescia entered the republic — ruling both settlements until Venice fell in 1797.

In their Stato da Mar, along the Adriatic, the Venetians used the sea itself to defend their conquests, building a clutch of mini-Venices along the coast. Here, at the western edge of their territory, nudging up against the Duchy of Milan, they constructed something equally impressive: gargantuan walls, up to 23 metres high, rippling up, down and around the hillside, clasping the city in a 5km embrace.

Those walls, now Unesco-protected, are still standing — so indomitable are they that the city launched tuk-tuk tours around them last summer. Inside them stand grand palazzos, loggias, a Venetian-style clock tower and a fountain guarded by snarling Venetian lions in the square. That main street, Via Colleoni, is named after a legendary mercenary — a Bergamasco who led the Venetians to many victories. In Venice, his 1475 death was marked with a king-size bronze statue; here, he knocked down an entire portion of the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore to build his enormous, self-contained funerary chapel, essentially leaving Bergamo with three churches in its main square: the Romanesque basilica, his Renaissance resting place and the Neoclassical-Baroque cathedral.

Bergamo’s artistic legacy is entwined with that of Venice, too. Lorenzo Lotto came here from Venice: “There was too much competition there, but in Bergamo he became top of his class,” says guide Matteo Scaccabarozzi in Santa Maria Maggiore.

In Bergamo Lotto created a unique work: Bible stories on the iconostasis, crafted from inlaid wood. Waves foam around Noah’s Ark as pairs of hares and goats sniff their new partners; David and Goliath are represented as a cartoon strip, the young shepherd loading his sling, felling the giant, sawing off his head and brandishing it to an adoring female crowd. Down in the Città Bassa is the Accademia Carrara, packed with even more Venetian big-hitters: Titian, Tiepolo and Bellini, alongside Pietro Longhi’s portraits of 18th-century lagoon life. Bergamo is far busier than Brescia — tourism began here 20 years ago, says Scaccabarozzi, while it’s only just getting started next door — yet, even on a bank holiday, I find myself alone among the Mantegnas and Carpaccios.

At Palazzo Moroni, I climb a wildly frescoed staircase worthy of the Grand Canal — trompe-l’œil figures hanging off the ceiling, mythical women on the walls — into rose-scented gardens and a rumpled meadow, opened to the public in 2020, when the Bergamaschi needed to stay outside. Despite those dark pandemic images, Bergamo is one of Italy’s great outdoor cities, I realise as we chug past the vineyards and buttercup-filled fields of the Valle d’Astino, west of the Città Alta, on one of the new tuk-tuks.

“It was a tragedy that we’ll carry inside us for ever,” says Scaccabarozzi of the pandemic, as we pass cherry trees, hops and blackcurrant bushes, the Venetian walls beyond the palm trees up the hill. “I hope we won’t talk about it any more,” he hints. We change the subject to the Capital of Culture. “Maybe it’s recognition of what we went through,” he says, uncertainly. This time, I can reassure him, he’s absolutely wrong.

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