This day trip started out as a barely sketched out idea with one goal in mind: to see the UNESCO Site of Crespi d’Adda. To accomplish this I took 3 trains, 3 busses (an extra one because I messed up), 1 metro, and walked through 3 towns. My journey started at 8:00 am with a 40-minute train to Milan and then a 40-minute train to Bergamo.
Bergamo was very unique, there is a lower city and a higher city, the “cittá alta” is the one with more of a historic center so that is where I headed. I took a funicular up the mountainside and just walked around and popped into whichever free museum I wanted to. The views were just amazing; you could just look across the valley for days. Bergamo’s downside is its loud and obnoxious bell tower, which I unfortunately happened to stand next to at exactly noon. The Duomo’s ceiling however made up for the awful din below AND there was an art exhibit inside the Duomo’s attic. The walk up was dizzying and narrow but well worth it. I was kind of afraid out because it was so dark and I felt as if the floor would give way at any minute.
From Bergamo I took a bus to a town, Terezzo, and then walked 30 minutes to the town of Crespi d’Adda. It definitely has to be one of the weirdest UNESCO Sites I’ve seen yet. The town is important because in the 19th and 20th centuries it was developed as one of the first industrial towns – where the owner of a factory (the Crespi family) created a town for their workers to live in and a villa for them to “rule” from (the factory closed in 2003). It kind of reminds me of the medieval concept of a feudal lordship, except industrial style. Since one family built all of it, everything matches and it creepily looked like a semi-deserted Pleasant-ville.
The village was founded by Cristoforo Benigno Crespi, to house the workers in his textile factory. Completed in the late 1920s, the town offered employees a high standard of living with housing in multi-family residences (each with its own garden) and community services that were well ahead of the times. Workers benefited from other amenities in addition to housing including public lavatories and wash-houses, a clinic, a consumer cooperative, a school, a small theatre, a sports centre, a house for the local priest and one for the doctor, a hydroelectric power station which supplied free electricity and other common services. Crespi d’Adda is an outstanding example of the 19th and early 20th century phenomenon of the ‘company town’ found in Europe and North America, which was an expression of the prevailing philosophy of enlightened industrialists towards their employees.
After leaving Crespi d’Adda I promptly got lost. I did not know exactly where to get transportation back to Milan but I knew I had to get to Gessate to take a metro to Milan. So I decided to start walking in the direction towards Milan and figured I would eventually find a faster way of getting there than my feet. After asking everyone I saw (which weren’t many people), I finally found the bus I was looking for but in my nervousness I got off too early and had to wait 30 minutes for the bus to come back around. In the end I got to Gessate to take a metro to Milan and then a train to Novara.
Read more: Not all those who wander are lost, but I am!
Thanks to the lovely Maddy and Maria with hot pizza was coming out of the oven as I arrived at home. I was exhausted and famished!
JMO
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