The Palazzo del Podestà, a splendid medieval residence, houses on the first floor, the Historical Museum of the Venetian Age – The Interactive 16th century: the history of Venetian Bergamo comes back to life before the eyes of visitors thanks to new multimedia and interactive technologies.
The idea behind the exhibition itinerary of the new Museum of the Venetian Age – the interactive Cinquecento is based on two main concepts: travel and knowledge.
The journey that the public takes in the theaters is a gradual approach to the history of the city of Bergamo in the sixteenth century, to discover people, places, activities and businesses.
In the first rooms of the museum the journey starts from the worldview at the end of the Middle Ages. We travel from Venice to Bergamo together with nuncios, rectors, merchants, mail carriers, vagabonds, until we reach the city "posta supra monte mirabellissima", among villages and neighborhoods, palaces and convents, with their men and their stories.
This landscape will then be profoundly transformed by the construction of the Venetian walls and the city "reduced to a fortress" presents itself to the visitor at the beginning of the second part of the itinerary through Stefano Scolari’s map of 17th century Bergamo, and then opens the doors of two of its many places of commerce: the apothecary’s shop ("aromatario") and the bookseller’s shop ("bibliopola"), as always recreated in interactive forms.
The route closes on the large Prato di S. Alessandro, in the lower town, where the voices and sounds of the great market of the Fair go on stage.
