Italy
Bergamo Alta
A walled medieval hilltop city reached by funicular, floating above the Lombardy plain.
The funicular climbs from the modern city below and deposits you inside Venetian walls where cobblestone lanes echo with church bells and the smell of sage butter drifts from cellar kitchens. Bergamo Alta floats above the Lombardy plain like a city that refused to descend. From the ramparts, the Po Valley stretches south in a haze of green.
Bergamo Alta is the upper town of Bergamo in Lombardy, Italy — a fortified medieval settlement enclosed by 16th-century Venetian walls now designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The Piazza Vecchia anchors the upper town, flanked by the Palazzo della Ragione and the Colleoni Chapel, whose Renaissance facade is among the most decorated in northern Italy. Gaetano Donizetti, one of opera's most prolific composers, was born here, and his legacy threads through the city in museums and performance halls. The funicular connecting the upper and lower towns has been running since 1887, making the ascent part of the ritual.
Solo
The compact upper town rewards slow exploration — every lane curves into a new piazza, and the funicular ride up feels like entering a private city above the clouds.
Couple
Evening aperitivo on the Piazza Vecchia as lights warm the Palazzo della Ragione, then dinner in a candlelit cellar trattoria serving casoncelli in sage butter.
Family
The funicular ride is an adventure in itself, the rampart walks are wide and safe, and the gelaterias in the piazza keep everyone happy between churches.
- The Venetian-era funicular connecting lower and upper city has been running since 1887 and is still used by daily commuters.
- The Venetian walls enclosing the upper city are wide enough to walk along for three kilometres with open views over the Lombardy plain.
- The Accademia Carrara holds one of Italy's most undervisited Renaissance collections — Raphael, Botticelli, and Bellini — in a neo-classical building with no queues.
- Le Corbusier described the Piazza Vecchia as the most beautiful square in Europe — it is a Venetian civic set-piece framed on all four sides.
Casoncelli pasta stuffed with meat and crushed amaretti, tossed in sage butter.
Polenta e osei, a dessert shaped like songbirds perched on polenta, made of chocolate and marzipan.
San Ignacio Miní
Argentina
Jungle-strangled Jesuit ruins where Guaraní once played baroque beneath a canopy now claimed by howler monkeys.
Cidade Velha
Cape Verde
First colonial city in the tropics — a slave pillory still stands in the silent square.
Cajamarca
Peru
The stone room where the last Inca emperor offered to fill the walls with gold ransom.
Rosetta
Egypt
Ottoman mansions with mashrabiya screens leaning over lanes where the key to hieroglyphs was found.
Venice
Italy
Dawn light on a silent canal where only your footsteps echo on wet stone.
Sacra di San Michele
Italy
A thousand-year-old abbey growing from a mountaintop, its staircase carved through living rock.
San Leo
Italy
Cagliostro — the alchemist who conned half of Europe — died imprisoned in this clifftop fortress.
Comacchio
Italy
A lagoon town of canals where eels have been trapped and smoked since Roman times.