Bergamo Alta, a stone labyrinth of walls, Colleoni and Lotto

Climbing up to Bergamo Alta, on foot or by funicular, means entering a tangle of streets, small squares and passages that seems designed on purpose to make you lose your bearings. The upper town, enclosed within its walls, has often been described as a labyrinth of stone. This image allows us to read its monuments through one of the oldest and richest symbols of the European tradition, the labyrinth, which the Christian Middle Ages had turned into a metaphor for the journey of the soul.

The symbol of the labyrinth

The labyrinth was born in Greek mythology with the structure built by Daedalus on Crete, where Theseus faced the Minotaur and found the way out thanks to Ariadne's thread. In the Middle Ages the motif was adopted by the Church: labyrinths were carved or set in mosaic in cathedrals, such as the famous one in the floor of Chartres or the one carved on a pillar of the portico of Lucca cathedral, accompanied by an inscription recalling the Cretan myth.

In its Christian meaning, the labyrinth became the image of the winding path of life, which through detours and returns leads to the centre, that is to God or to the heavenly Jerusalem. Following its coils with the eyes or the feet was equivalent to a small pilgrimage. This symbolic value lends itself well to describing the experience of anyone who crosses the alleys of the upper town in search of its treasures.

The walls and the Colleoni Chapel

The circuit enclosing Bergamo Alta was built by the Republic of Venice from 1561, to make the city a western bulwark of Venice's mainland dominions. More than six kilometres long, the walls have been part since 2017 of the UNESCO site devoted to Venetian defence works of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. They were never besieged, and today they offer a panoramic walk over the plain.

In the heart of the town, beside the basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore, stands the Colleoni Chapel, built between 1472 and 1476 to a design by Giovanni Antonio Amadeo for the condottiere Bartolomeo Colleoni, captain general of Venice. The façade, rich in polychrome marble, mixes biblical episodes, mythological figures and classical motifs. The condottiere's coat of arms, with an obvious pun on his surname, is linked to a superstitious custom: people touch it for good luck.

The enigmatic inlays of Lorenzo Lotto

The most surprising treasure lies inside Santa Maria Maggiore. The basilica's wooden choir is decorated with inlays made to designs by Lorenzo Lotto, who worked on the project from 1524, and executed by the inlayer Giovan Francesco Capoferri. The main panels illustrate episodes from the Old Testament with a narrative liveliness rare in this art.

Even more unusual are the coperti, covering panels that served to protect the inlays and that bear allegorical compositions of obscure meaning, with objects, animals and figures combined in enigmatic ways. Scholars have read them as devices and emblems inspired by the symbolic culture of the Renaissance, and their precise sense is still debated. They are a true labyrinth of images within the labyrinth of the town.

Bergamo Alta thus invites a journey that is both physical and symbolic. The Venetian walls, the condottiere's chapel and Lotto's inlays ask the visitor to get lost and find their way again, as in the medieval labyrinth. It is a way of visiting the town that needs no invented legends: documented history and symbols are enough to turn a walk into a small quest.