From Bergamo to Brescia

  

 

 

 

 

Edward Hutton provided an almost innumerable list of the pictures to be found in Bergamo and Brescia but the scenery surrounding these hill towns pleased him most.

Accademia Carrara: Bergamo

The Accademia Carrara of Bergamo, just outside the Porta Santa Caterina, consists of three collections, one of which is very famous. These three collections are the Galleria Carrara, the Galleria Luchis and the Galleria Morelli…. [176]

 

These two collections, the Carrara and Luchis galleries, would be enough to bring renown to any city half as lovely as Bergamo. But, as it happens, they are but the smaller part of her dowry. In the year 1891, the great art critic and connoisseur, Giovanni Morelli, died at Milan, and bequeathed his magnificent collection of pictures to his native city. These three collections, well arranged by the Director Signor Frizzoni, were, till the year 1911, the delight of every traveller who entered Bergamo. In that year a rearrangement of the three collections was entered upon, and the gallery was closed for a time. What the new arrangement may be  we cannot say, but it is to be hoped that the Morelli collection will still be shown as a thing apart; for it is fully characteristic of the great critic and of his triumphs of connoisseurship….[178]

 

When all is said, however, the true delight of Bergamo will always be found in Bergamo herself: in her winding steep streets, her narrow ways, her windy piazzas, her shady ramparts and marvellous views of blue far-away mountains, so often covered with snow, and of the valleys and the plain, green and silver and gold, and the glory of the setting sun. [182]

There is no more delightful and consoling road in all North Italy, south of the mountains, than that which leads at last from Bergamo to Brescia. This book does not propose to deal with the mountains, the Bergamesque and Brescian Alps, for they deserve and shall have a book to themselves; therefore I say nothing of such places as Alzano and its Lottos; it is the plain with which we are concerned, the true Cisalpine Gaul and the true Lombardy, and I know not where in all that vast country you will better the thirty miles that lie between Bergamo and Brescia. For the way is by no means a monotony of flatness, but is broken by low hills and downs, and little passes and valleys about the feet of the mountains, and there, on the hill-tops or beside the rivers, stands many a fair town worthy of remembrance, to say nothing of the castles, shrines and churches which are often worthy of Tuscany, and of Tuscany at its best. And this is especially the reward of him who will go slowly, loitering by the way….  [183]

The city of Brescia, which has thus known so many agonies, is a quiet little place, crouched like a mouse, hid under its Castello at the foot of the great hills. and, if we except the Roman ruins, and the old cathedral and the Broletto, the town for us is really just a delightful picture gallery, where one wanders at random from church to church in search of the painters of the native school of painting. [187]

 

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Edward Hutton: The Cities of Lombardy, New York, 1912. Pp. 176-187.