Don't Dream It's Over
Once Upon a Time in Bergamo
Even on nights when the light of the moon is obscured by clouds, you can always seek out the illuminated Venetian walls of Città Alta glowing high above the Villa should you venture out onto the pergola. Through the pointed tops of the cypress and chestnut trees that tower on the hillside, the silver-lit stone walls have faithfully looked down on the Villa for centuries, and on any given night, in any given year, diplomats, artists, soldiers, socialites, singers, or spies would be seen smoking and drinking vermouth under the hanging purple wisteria that had, with the passing of time, climbed and choked the old wooden canopy of the pergola over decades, watching over all who would come and go.
The Villa is a product of the Republic of Venice, whose western territories had once stretched all the way here to Bergamo, at the foot of the Alps. And a reminder of the Villa's Venetian past still lingers in the winged lions that guard the front entrance. By the time Garibaldi liberated Bergamo from the Austrians in 1859, the Villa was already more than 100 years old, and had been the home to two different bloodlines.
A long-buried entrance to Bergamo’s Sotterranea, the maze of underground tunnels, crypts and hideouts built by the Romans beneath the city, was discovered during the construction of the pergola in 1911, and kept secret by the family in residence.
In the 20s, during the rise of Fascism in Italy, the Villa saw the comings and goings of party members, ministers, propagandists, and oligarchs, and its house staff, with shaky hands and sweaty brows, served ossobuco and Valtellina Superiore to foreign leaders through a haze of cigar smoke and candlelight in the grand dining room.
In 1939, two young doe-eyed Spaniards attended a gala at the Villa in hopes of finding some opening in which they could climb into the upper crust of Italian society after the horrors of the Spanish Civil War. Cousins on divergent paths. The girl, with stars in her eyes, became an actress and married famed Italian film director Vittorio De Sica. And the boy, with daggers in his, went on to assassinate the exiled Russian Revolutionary, Leon Trotsky, with an ice axe in Mexico City.
In 1942 the Villa’s middle son joined up with the 15th infantry division of Bergamo and went to chase Yugoslav Partisans down the Dalmatian coast, and the very next year in 1943, after the fall of Mussolini, the intricate fresco in the entrance hall was hastily plastered over by the young soldier’s mother when the Nazis came to Bergamo. There was still dirt under her fingernails from burying the family jewels in the hillside when the soldiers passed through the iron gates and quartered at the Villa for the duration of the temporary occupation. The Nazis never found the entrance to the Sotterranea hidden beneath the wooden slats of the pergola, nor did they discover the jewels in the hillside or the covered fresco in the hall.
During one weekend in 1955, a barefoot Hollywood starlet that was shacking up at the Villa with a married Italian politician left a pot of polenta taragna unattended on the stove, setting the kitchen on fire. She had attempted the recipe after he told her it was his favorite meal. When Italian gossip magazine Oggi ran the story, the politician’s pregnant wife was quoted saying: “That stronza Americana can’t even cook a polenta properly, let alone have a proper affair. They deserve each other!”
In 1967, during the Cold War, a young American diplomatic attaché spilled government secrets to a green-eyed beauty in a silk dress in the Villa’s library. “You smell like rosebuds and jasmine, and I think I love you,” he had confessed to her with scotch on his breath. The next morning the young woman relayed her findings to her bosses at the Kremlin by encrypted radio cipher.
In the early 1970s, during Italy’s bloody Years of Lead, the Villa became a refuge for spooked Sciure* from Brera fleeing violent anti-fascist protests and bombings in Milano. They would sit under the purple wisteria vines clutching their pearls and declaring the fall of civility as they knew it.
And during a New Year’s Eve party in 1978, the drummer of a famed American jazz band—who the night before had been fired during the middle of a gig at Capolinea— procured a large amount of benzodiazepines from a young valet and rode a Moto Guzzi Nuovo Falcone four-stroke motorcycle right through the Villa’s front doors and into a champagne tower.
In 1982, the heiress to a Bergamasco textiles magnate, who wanted nothing more than to be loved, leapt from a balcony on the Villa’s third floor. The cigarette was still in her mouth when her head hit the gravel motor court. And 10 years later, in 1992, a grunge band from Seattle rented out the Villa to record an album, claiming the ghost of the dead heiress as their inspiration.
With the 2000s came renovations and restorations, and anyone who had known of the secret entrance under the pergola was long dead. The secret remained only with the Villa itself, and those curious Venetian walls up on the hill.
The Villa has seen three marriage proposals, seven weddings, four wakes, and one water birth presided over by a Swedish doula. It has seen love, loss, heartache, history and the beginnings and ends of countless romances, no doubt. It has told tales of war and of peace, and been a quiet observer of the passing of time, memories and secrets etched into the walls and hidden beneath the floorboards forever.
On a misty morning in 2025, while digging at the hillside behind the old Villa, a cocker spaniel discovered a sapphire ring buried among the roots. An artifact of a distant war and desperate deception, forgotten by time, and uncovered by chance, like many an Italian relic.
-NP
*Sciure: the Lombard dialect term for elegant, wealthy older women from Milano, known for their fur coats, pearl necklaces, little dogs, and uncompromising attitudes.
Links you should click:
Design a curated vacation in Italy
Bravo for the post and for reminding me to listen to Crowded House!
This is so choice I don’t even know where to start! Ahhhh!!!!