Lovere

The lake here is known locally as Il Sebino, and the town sits at its northwest corner, where the shore curves between the water and the Bergamasque foothills before rising into the lower and upper parts of the borgo. The lower town holds the fortified medieval core, its towers still visible above the rooftops, while the centro storico below fills out with the palaces of a later, richer period. That wealth came under the Republic of Venice, built on wool cloth production and trade, and it paid for the basilica and the family chapel that would later hold the Tadini collection.

The first settlement on this shore goes back to the fifth and fourth centuries BC, with a Celtic core, long before any of what stands here now. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, writing from here in the eighteenth century, called it the most romantic place she had ever seen, and the town has been in I Borghi più belli d'Italia since 2003, the only Lombardia commune to finish in the top twenty of the 2018 Borgo dei Borghi ranking. What these facts add up to is a town shaped in layers, Celtic shore, medieval fortress, Venetian wealth, each still legible in the ground it left behind.