If you like taking a trip back in history, you’ll enjoy the Cathedral Museum. During the recent work to renew the church’s heating system, a number of findings related to the building’s history were brought to light, and in 2012, the underground area was fitted out and opened to the public.
The museum offers a chance to explore the episodes that have marked the history of the place, reconstructed with precious art and liturgical objects, plunging the visitor right into the beautiful, sacred atmosphere of this centuries-old Cathedral.
Incredible though it seems, hidden beneath the floor of the Cathedral was an authentic glimpse of Bergamo’s history, which can now be reconstructed by following the visitor route. The work of the archeologists has even brought back to life the urban fabric of the Roman age, at the center of which the first Christian church was built: surprisingly, it was a strikingly large basilica, at least 45 meters long and 24 meters wide. If you pay close attention along the visitor route, you’ll notice the mosaic floor of the original church, laid on top of the floors of earlier Roman dwellings.
The sarcophagi and tombs you’ll encounter along the way are a reminder that churches were once used as places of burial.
During the major renovation work carried out when the city flourished after becoming an independent commune at the end of the 12th century, the venerable basilica was destroyed and replaced with the Romanesque cathedral, more in line with the tastes of the time. A century later, the cathedral again underwent major refurbishment.
Dating to this period are the frescoes you can still see on the wall that separates the area reserved for the priests from the rest of the church, featuring immobile figures of saints and unearthly, alluring apparitions.
In the middle of the route is the Treasure of the Cathedral: don’t forget to take a look at the extraordinary silver cross that once used to be taken out in procession.
Before I go, an interesting fact: on the place where Saint Alexander died a martyr, believed to be in Lower Bergamo, a column was erected, and a church later built, given the name of Sant’Alessandro in Colonna. During the celebrations on the patron saint’s day on 26th August, a procession starts out from here and makes its way up here to the Cathedral in Upper Bergamo.
