Bergamo, Italy

After we left Lake Garda we decided to break up the journey with a a trip to Bergamo (a small city in Italy). We stayed in a small Air BnB apartment.

We wanted to explore the old walled city of Bergamo so we took a Funicular (a train pulled by a cable that carries people up a steep hill). We wandered around the ancient streets of the older part of the city. There was a huge garden show in the centre of the streets. The main square had an exhibition garden by Nigel Dunnett (an inspiring garden designer). We walked into a small building with interactive things to do including:a sustainable urban drainage system display. A sustainable urban drainage system (SuDS) is when rain water that hits hard surfaces like roofs or tarmac, is diverted into the flower\plant beds instead of streams and rivers. It helps to reduce flooding. There was also a big magnetic picture of plants that you can throw paper flowers with magnets inside onto the wall to make pretty flower pictures (as you can see in the picture below) and lots of facts about different varieties of plants!

We also saw some Roman ruins that got destroyed within the fall of the Roman empire (that lasted nearly 500 hundred years) and humans being humans built over the interesting past of our ancestors that were so rudely forgotten!

This part of the town holds one of the most interesting maps in the whole world drawn by a man called Ptolemy. It shows how people understood the world to look like in around 100AD.