Sundays for villas, palaces and castles reaches its ninth edition and will take visitors among the great historic buildings of Bergamo and its province. Appointment with guided tour at Camozzi Vertova Castle.
The castle, born as a defensive fortification, has very ancient origins. Its structure testifies to its early medieval origin, placing it among the oldest preserved castles in Lombardy. The three elements of which it was composed, the keep on the top of the hill, the fortress halfway up the hill, to which the keep was apparently connected by an underground walkway, and the tower in the village presumably date back to the 10th century, when they were built to defend the Lombardy plain from invaders coming from the Camonica Valley and the Brenner Pass. In the 12th century, Alberto degli Albertonis de Capitaneis de Vertua, who was the representative in Lodi of the Lombard League and signed the Peace of Constance in 1183, became its owner. In medieval times, the castle of Costa di Mezzate was a strong bulwark of defense against Niccolò Piccinino, who at the head of Duke Filippo Maria Visconti’s troops, was completing the encirclement of the Venetian army led by Francesco Gonzaga, when he was blocked by the strenuous defense of the fortress. In the following centuries, the castle partly lost its medieval fortress character to adapt to the new Renaissance taste, becoming a stately home. In spite of this transformation, by the descendants of Alberto degli Albertoni, who in later centuries abandoned the surname Albertoni and retained only the predicate Vertova, its events remained closely linked to Italian history, as evidenced by the documents in the archives and the visit of illustrious personages, such as Margaret of Savoy, Queen of Italy, and St. Charles Borromeo, who stayed there in the 17th century. The last male descendant of the Counts Vertova died in the first half of the 1800s; their line continued in the female line with Countess Elisabetta nei Camozzi de Gherardi Vertova, whose children wrote the finest pages of the History of the Bergamasque Risorgimento. Owned by Countess Maria Edvige Palma Camozzi de Gherardi Vertova, today the castle, with its ancient towers, frescoed rooms, Italianate garden and the numerous works of art enclosed in it, represents a remarkable historical and artistic heritage.
