175. On the Road Again

It’s been a long year, filled with illness, worry and several cancelled trips to Italy. But the clouds have started to lift, and this seemed like the perfect time to grab our chance, before something else went south.

Having the luxury of having already been to the big tourist destinations, we can pick a destination for the most random reasons. Ben knew of a major tennis tournament in Torino, and my daughter Maria has a special fondness for Bergamo from her time as an itinerant counselor at an English-language camp fifteen years ago, so bingo, those were compelling enough reasons for us.

Sure enough, Bergamo is a lovely small city in the foothills of the Alps, filled with upscale shops and fashionable people. Yes, it’s November, but even still, there is no sense that this is a place dominated by tourists, even in the high season. It’s a perfect place to soak up the atmosphere of daily life in a prosperous northern Italian town.

But one can’t help feeling a sense of melancholy being here. If the name Bergamo sounds familiar to you, it’s probably because it was the epicenter of the pandemic when Covid first hit Italy, and came into focus for Americans as something that was not just a distant threat. Bergamo lost 3,000 of its 120,000 citizens in those terrible months of 2020. Now, nearly four years later, the streets are bustling and there’s no outward sign of this trauma. But I imagine that no one was untouched.