Bergamo Means "Heaven" in Italian

In the sixteenth century, after generations of citizens of the northern Italian city of Bergamo suffered a series of invasions by the French and the Spanish, the Venetians (who were occupying Bergamo when it wasn't being occupied by the French or Spanish) built seventy-foot-thick walls to keep out future invaders. However, they left large gates open throughout the walled city, effectively rendering the barriers useless except to attract tourists. And they came, the tourists, in droves. (This was some time later.) My favorite art historian and I managed to sneak in too. Of course we are not tourists; she wanted to come here to do research on something in a museum, and the fact that the museum is closed and we're here looking at the same things as the tourists does not make us tourists.

We arrived here after an overnight train dropped us in Milan and we transferred to a commuter. Overnight train travel in reality bears absolutely no similarity to what Alfred Hitchcock and others have shown me in countless movies. For one thing, there's no plush dining car, or at least I didn't see one. More importantly, there's no room: we were stuffed into a compartment along with four other people, and the beds, which fold down from the walls, are narrow, hard, uncomfortable shelves so tightly packed together that I couldn't lie on my back because my feet would have touched the luggage rack. We were berth-mates to a gaggle of French high school girls on a camping expedition, so we had to endure their constant chattering, their enormous backpacks that didn't fit into any of the storage spaces, and the inevitable gaggle of chattering teenage boys along on the same school-sponsored camping trip. We waited until they had all moved on to talk loudly in the hall and in neighboring compartments, and we quickly pounced, pulling down the beds and installing ourselves in the top bunks. When the girls returned, they were forced to sleep or at least lie down and chatter. I think they decided on the latter, but I had taken some nighttime sinus medicine, so I was able to sleep fitfully until our arrival in Milan at 5:30 in the morning. We took a quick, surreal trip to the local cathedral (surreal because I think I was still asleep for most of it), which is notable for its triangular facade, and made it back in time for the commuter train to Bergamo, a small city in the north of Italy. After a nap at our hotel, the Golden Fleece (or Lamb), we started exploring.

It was incredibly beautiful there, with winding cobblestone streets too narrow for the cars that drove down them at high speeds, huge stone arches, little shops tucked into the sides of 500-year-old buildings, and hills. Lots of hills. The old city of Bergamo, the one surrounded by the porous walls, sits atop a mountain, and just about every direction is either downhill or uphill. While walking up one of them, we discovered the Church of Saint Erasmus, which, like just about everything else here, is undergoing restoration. The doors were half open, so we edged in, into one of the nicest vacation surprises either of us has ever had. A little old lady interrupted her duties—laying out programs for an upcoming service—and gave us an extended, private tour of the church, including areas that are normally locked away from the eyes of tourists. We wandered around behind the altar as she described the restoration process, the history of the church and the surrounding areas, and other things in Italian, which I do not understand at all. MFAH translated the important stuff, but it was sort of like subtitles on a foreign film: I got the information, but I missed the poetry. She led us down dusty halls, over and under scaffolding, and into the bowels of the building, talking rapidly all the while, until she shepherded us to what I'll call "the treasure room": a small room decorated with exquisitely painted, peeling, unrestored murals, topped by a vaulted ceiling lined with more paintings, and stuffed to the rafters with booty. (Can I call it booty? It would be booty if I were there to steal it. It would have made one hell of a haul for a pirate.) There were fabulous statues and candelabra and various carved and painted and gilded objets d'art, some being restored, some just moved there to get them out of the way of the scaffolding in the rest of the church. We got some wonderful photographs to go with our unforgettable experience.

But we had only a day there, and now we're on a train to Rome. The shouting children got off at the last stop, so it's relatively peaceful now. I'm watching the mountains of Italy roll past the windows, marveling at the ancient, tiny towns perched along rocky cliffs, all roofed with that pretty reddish tile that seems to be the national roofing of Italy, at least the few parts of Italy I've seen. Sometimes we go through miles-long tunnels, and I marvel at the effort involved in linking together cities in a region this mountainous. I'm wondering what we'll do when we get to Rome, where we're staying with a college friend of MFAH's, her husband the architect, and their children. I'm wondering how the show went last night at my theater, where my new minions were on their own for the first time with a 35mm film. I'm wondering whether I'll be ready to go back when I have to depart on Thursday: if four days wasn't enough time in Paris, how can parts of four days be enough in Rome? I guess I'll just have to come back.

(We're in Rome now! More on that later.)