Bergamo keeps an essentially complete Renaissance town sitting on its hilltop, sealed inside the Venetian walls and reached, most memorably, by a funicular that has climbed since 1887 through the ramparts themselves, its two orange cars gliding past centuries-old stonework on the way up.
At the top, Piazza Vecchia gathers the civic library, the twelfth-century Torre Civica and a Renaissance fountain into a composition regularly called the most beautiful square in Italy, with little serious argument. Just off it, the Colleoni Chapel's polychrome marble facade and the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore's Baroque interior round out a hilltop that manages to feel both monumental and, at aperitivo hour, entirely lived-in.
