Bergamo's Città Alta – a day trip from Milan to the city on the hill

About an hour from Milan by train, Bergamo's upper town sits inside sixteenth-century Venetian walls that are now a World Heritage Site. A day of funiculars, Renaissance chapels and one of Italy's great picture galleries – and, for those who stay for dinner, three MICHELIN stars nearby.

Bergamo is really two towns. The Città Bassa, the lower town, spreads across the plain; above it, on a ridge of hills, the Città Alta is a medieval and Renaissance town wrapped in sixteenth-century walls, joined to the lower one by a funicular, winding roads and steep footpaths. In 2023 Bergamo and the neighbouring Brescia shared the title of Italian Capital of Culture, the first time two cities had held it together.

From Milan it makes an easy and rewarding day: a morning in the upper town, an afternoon on the walls and in the galleries, and back for dinner – or dinner here, at one of Italy's most celebrated restaurants.

Up the funicular

Regional trains run from Milano Centrale and Porta Garibaldi to Bergamo in about an hour. From the station, follow the long avenue towards the hills to the lower station of the funicular on Viale Vittorio Emanuele II. The line made its first run on 20 September 1887 and still climbs through gardens and old walls to the edge of the upper town; a second funicular continues higher, to the hill of San Vigilio.

Piazza Vecchia

The heart of the Città Alta is Piazza Vecchia, one of the most harmonious squares in Lombardy. On one side the Palazzo della Ragione, the old seat of the city's government, stands on open arcades beneath the civic tower; opposite, the white front of the Angelo Mai library closes the square. Pass under the arcades of the Palazzo della Ragione and you come out beside the cathedral and the basilica.

Santa Maria Maggiore and the Cappella Colleoni

The basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore holds a great crucifix and the tomb of Gaetano Donizetti, the composer and Bergamo's most famous son. Beside it, the Cappella Colleoni is one of the masterpieces of Renaissance architecture and decoration in northern Italy: the funerary chapel that the condottiere Bartolomeo Colleoni commissioned for himself, designed by Giovanni Antonio Amadeo and built between 1472 and 1476, with a façade of coloured marble that seems almost too rich for the small square it faces.

The walls and the hills

The Venetian Republic ringed the upper town with massive walls in the sixteenth century, and since 9 July 2017 they have been part of a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Walking the tree-lined top of the ramparts, with the plain on one side and the town on the other, is one of the pleasures of the day. Inside the walls, the Cittadella, built under the Visconti in the mid-fourteenth century, now houses museums, and the Rocca looks out over the rooftops.

The Accademia Carrara

Back in the lower town, at the foot of the hill, the Accademia Carrara is one of Italy's great picture galleries. The collector Giacomo Carrara founded it in the early 1780s and left it his whole estate; today it shows Raphael's Saint Sebastian of 1501–02, Pisanello's portrait of Lionello d'Este of 1441 and Giovanni Bellini's Madonna di Alzano, among many others. It reopened in January 2023, during the Capital of Culture year, after a major refurbishment.

Dinner at Da Vittorio

If you stay for the evening, Da Vittorio, at Brusaporto just east of the city, holds three MICHELIN stars in the 2026 guide. The Cerea family are ever-present in the kitchen and the dining room; beside the à la carte there are four tasting menus, from eight courses of meat inspired by papa Vittorio's traditional recipes to twelve courses of free creativity, and the meal ends with a cheese trolley and an array of sweets.

For a weekend. For a lifetime.