Bergamo

Jason Horowitz is a Rome neighbor, a friend of many friends, someone I have wanted to meet for a long time after he wrote a splendid piece on Etruscan tomb robbers, a topic which holds special interest to me.

His New York Times article today with extensive photography, “We Take the Dead From Morning to Night” (https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/03/27/world/europe/coronavirus-italy-bergamo.html?action=click&module=Spotlight&pgtype=Homepage) is devastating, and for its immediacy and intensity feels like graphic war reporting. The photography, of bedrooms, and morgues and hospital corridors, is devastating.

The effect is despair coexistent with wonder at the resiliency of those who fight to keep living, and illustrates especially the bravery and professional dedication of the health care angels whom, in a disaster of Biblical proportions, snatch back the ill from death. 

I visited Bergamo for the first time thirty years ago to see the Accademia Carrara, a jewel, one of Italy’s great under-sung painting collections. There are Mantegna, Botticelli, Bellini, Tiepolo, Canaletto and Raffaello, and the curation and labelling/descriptive panels are of the highest level.

I spent a happy half hour in a salumeria on Via Colleoni in Bergamo’s medieval Città Alta (magnificent upper city, where less than 2% of the population live) and where the owners were so full of kindness and enthusiasm that besides giving me samples of at least five pungent local cheeses, recommended personal favorite trattorie for the several nights I was there, insisting on making the first reservation for me (“a small place, very popular, it would be so disappointing not to have their casoncelli this evening’.) 

The best birthday cake I ever had came from Bergamo’s Pasticceria “La Mariana” also on the same trip, for my mother’s birthday. We took it on a picnic which we had on the way to Asiago, and I can still remember my mother helping herself to a third or fourth portion, with a plastic knife, and saying it was worth turning 65 to have such a cake.  

I’ve been back to Bergamo several times since, once especially to try La Marianna’s straciatella ice cream after learning that it was they who in 1961 invented the vanilla gelato flavor laced with chips of chocolate.

The Swiss-French artist and architect  Le Corbusier declared the Città Alta’s Piazza Vecchia Italy’s most beautiful square. Frank Lloyd Wright said that Bergamo left him “stunned and astonished.”

When I read obituaries this morning in the Eco di Bergamo, the city newspaper since 1880, and saw name after name after name (cited on the opening page of the New York Times article too), I wondered if among them are any of the welcoming Bergamaschi I met decades ago. The Eco di Bergamo does its brave civic duty (this is after all Lombardy) and reports on a one million Euro anonymous gift yesterday to the city, that oxygen is arriving more quickly to the hospitals’ ICU, that citizens must not let down their guard, and that an Egyptian fruit monger who ten years ago found himself welcomed as a refugee to Bergamo is now giving away fruit to those who cannot afford it. 

The picture is of a city that is compassionate, prosperous, on its knees and wants no more than to get well — and signal to the world, from its state of hell, that if it can happen in Bergamo, of all improbable places, it can happen anywhere.

My piece of yesterday, The Patrimony of our Elders, is also on Bergamo :  https://www.insidersitaly.com/the-patrimony-of-our-elders/.