Bergamo

Piazza Vecchia, the Colleoni Chapel and the climb to San Vigilio

Ride the funicular up to Città Alta early, before the crowds, and walk to Piazza Vecchia. Look at the Palazzo della Ragione and the Contarini fountain, then step behind them into Santa Maria Maggiore and the Colleoni Chapel, with its marble front and frescoed interior, and on to the Duomo.

Climb the Torre del Comune for the view if it is open.

Have lunch in Città Alta: casoncelli with butter and sage, or polenta with whatever comes alongside. In the afternoon walk Via Gombito past the 12th-century Gombito tower to the Rocca, then follow the Venetian walls around the edge of the hill. Take the second funicular from Colle Aperto up to San Vigilio for the widest view. Head down to the lower town in the evening, or stay up for dinner when the lanes go quiet. With a second day, add the Accademia Carrara art gallery or a trip to Lake Iseo.

Casoncelli, polenta e osei and a lanterna at Il Circolino

Bergamo's cooking comes from the valleys and the plain. Polenta is the staple, served soft with stews, cheese or mushrooms. The signature pasta is casoncelli, meat-filled parcels dressed with melted butter, sage and crisp pancetta. Cheeses from the Bergamo valleys, such as Taleggio and Branzi, turn up on most menus.

For something sweet, bakeries sell polenta e osei, a yellow dome of sponge and marzipan topped with little chocolate birds, a joke on an old dish of polenta with roasted songbirds. Città Alta's main street, Via Gombito and its continuation Via Colleoni, is lined with places to eat, though prices up there run higher than in the lower town.

For a local drink, find Il Circolino behind the Angelo Mai library, where regulars play bocce and share a lanterna, white wine with Campari.

Monte Isola, the Seriana Valley tram and the Lombard lakes

Bergamo is well placed for the lakes. Lake Iseo is about 30 km away, and boats from its shore cross to Monte Isola, a largely car-free island in the middle of the lake. Lake Como's Lecco arm is a similar distance, while Lake Garda and Lake Maggiore are much further, each roughly 100 km by road.

Milan is roughly 40 km away, close enough for a day of sightseeing on the regular trains from Bergamo station.

North of the city, the Bergamo Alps begin almost at once. The TEB tram runs up the Seriana valley, and the valleys beyond lead to walking trails in summer and small ski areas in winter. Closer still, the Parco dei Colli behind Città Alta has trails for a morning hike or a mountain bike ride.

Spring and early autumn suit these trips best. Summer brings haze and heat on the plain, and the lakes get busy at weekends.

The Venetian walls and the 10 pm bell

Bergamo's upper town sits inside about 6 km of walls that the Republic of Venice began in 1561, and UNESCO added them in 2017 to a cross-border listing of Venetian defences that also covers sites in Croatia and Montenegro. Building them cost the city more than 250 houses and eight religious buildings, the old cathedral of Sant'Alessandro among them.

Walk the tree-lined top of the ramparts between the four gates: Sant'Agostino to the east, San Giacomo to the south, Sant'Alessandro to the west and San Lorenzo to the north. Porta San Giacomo, in white stone above the road from the lower town, makes the best photograph. On weekends the inner ring road along the walls is closed to traffic.

Back on Piazza Vecchia, stay until 22:00. The Campanone, the civic tower, still rings 100 strokes every night, the old signal that the gates were about to close. The Angelo Mai library fills the Palazzo Nuovo opposite, and an 18th-century sundial is set into the pavement under the arches of the Palazzo della Ragione.

The Accademia Carrara and the funicular climb

Count Giacomo Carrara founded the Accademia Carrara in 1795 with his own collection, and the gallery at the foot of the upper town now holds more than 1,500 works from the 14th to the 19th century, including Botticelli, Titian, Canaletto and Hayez. A restoration finished in 2015, and some 50 sculptures from Federico Zeri's collection were added. Give it two hours.

The funicular up to Piazza Mercato delle Scarpe has been running for more than 120 years. Alessandro Ferretti drew the first design in 1887, and the line climbs 85 m over 240 m of track at a gradient of 52 percent, so the ride takes only a couple of minutes.

Val Brembana, a long suspension footbridge and San Pellegrino

North of the city, Val Brembana runs up into the Bergamo Alps, where the Pizzo del Diavolo di Tenda reaches 2,914 m and refuges such as the Grassi, Capanna 2000 and Laghi Gemelli serve hikers in summer.

A cycle path follows the Brembo along an old railway bed; from Villa d'Almè to Piazza Brembana takes about an hour and a half. On the way you pass the Art Nouveau spa of San Pellegrino and the medieval hamlet of Cornello dei Tasso, home of the family that ran Europe's early postal service. Higher up, the Ponte nel Sole, a suspension footbridge more than 500 m long, crosses the valley.

Colleoni's chapel and Lotto's inlaid choir

Beside the basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore, the Cappella Colleoni is the most photographed façade in Bergamo. The condottiere Bartolomeo Colleoni had it built as his own mausoleum, and to make room his men pulled down the basilica's sacristy. Giovanni Antonio Amadeo designed it, work began in about 1472 and it was largely finished by 1476. The front is a patterned skin of white, pink and dark marble, and inside a gilded equestrian statue of Colleoni rides above his tomb.

Santa Maria Maggiore itself looks plain from the square and is the opposite inside: gilded stucco, Flemish tapestries and, in the choir, wooden intarsia panels designed by Lorenzo Lotto and made by Giovan Francesco Capoferri between about 1523 and 1530. The Misericordia Maggiore, the confraternity that ran the basilica, commissioned the new choir in 1522. Most panels are kept covered, with a few opened at a time, so ask the custodian which can be seen.

Two easier outings suit families and rail travellers. Le Cornelle, a 12-hectare wildlife park on the edge of the city, has been open since 1981 and keeps around 100 species, tigers, elephants and leopards among them. Crespi d'Adda, a UNESCO-listed workers' village built by a cotton-mill family and often called the best preserved in Europe, lies a short drive south-west, with streets of identical houses, the mill, the school and the church laid out as one planned community.