History

Bergamo came under Venetian rule in 1428, becoming a strategically vital westernmost city of the Stato da Terra — the Republic’s mainland dominion. The old medieval walls offered little protection against the cannon fire of the Habsburgs and the Duchy of Milan across the valley. In the 1530s, engineers under the Provveditori delle Fortezze began planning a new bastion system. Construction on the current walls started in 1561 under the direction of Bongianni Gritti, with later supervision by Sforza Pallavicino. The project took nearly three decades and employed hundreds of local labourers quarrying the hard limestone of the Bergamasque foothills.

The walls never saw the major battle they were designed to withstand: geopolitical shifts made Bergamo a secondary front, and the fortifications spent most of their history as an imposing but peaceful symbol of Venetian authority. After the fall of the Republic in 1797 and the Napoleonic reorganisation of northern Italy, the walls lost their military function entirely. Nineteenth-century Bergamasques found a more productive use: the wide wall-walk became a panoramic promenade, a tradition that continues today.

The 2017 UNESCO inscription recognised the walls not as isolated ruins but as part of a coherent geopolitical system — the fortified chain Venice maintained from the Po plain to the eastern Adriatic.