Listen to the audio version of the article
“Maybe I’ve never told you but you’re like Bergamo to me.” So begins, almost in a whisper, one of the most anomalous love songs in the history of Italian popular music: you fall in love with a girl and you can’t find a better compliment to pay her than to compare her to music quiet and hardworking. a provincial town in the deep North. Praise her and praise that city, freeing her from centuries of dialect clichés and various harlequins. Because that city is your city and you have a deeper discussion: you talk about identity.
When Bergamo – this song – came out, it was February 2020 and it could be strange, at least as strange as the third place achieved by the band that recorded it in Sanremo: the Nuclear Tactical Penguins. Five years and a pandemic later those same six boys from Val Seriana are at the top of the album, CD and vinyl charts with Hello World and single with Icelandto gather sold out stadiums. Bergamo pier in the sense of the city, first in Il Sole 24 Ore quality of life rankingit turns out overnight cool.
There is something that has happened in the collective imagination during all this time, which has changed attitudes. You can take it narrow and stick to the numbers, or try to take it wide, fishing around traces of the exceptional nature of the degree that the city is going through. The first obstacle here, compared to the traditional narrative, relates to sport and in particular to individual primacyAtalanta at the top of the football championship: the Gasperini boys, who won in the Europa League last year, this year trying to break the scudetto taboo and the ten victories in a row prove that the candidacy of the “Banda” for the title is very credible and would . to be the absolute culmination of Pagliuca-Percassi’s famous management.
Not just football, anyway, we talk in Bergamo when we talk about sport and work Sofia Goggia in the Ski World Cup he is here to prove it. Super-G makes it possible for you to win even when you come off a bad injury, if you have plenty of talent and a solid work culture to back it up. Just as they showed at the Olympic Games in Paris with gold Chiara Consonni in madison cycling and the money of Georgia Villa in team gymnastics. And as shown by the record of Bergamo in 2024 in the ranking of the sports index Single 24 Ore.
When we talk about politics, our thoughts can’t help but go Giorgio Gorimayor of Bergamo for ten years and since last June elected MEP of the Democratic Party by popular vote: 210,790 choices to 178,343 in Lombardy made him the third most voted candidate in Italy at the 2024 European elections. He comes from the world of television and collective imagination knows about it. Daughter Alice, stage name Call me a lighthouseon Canale 5, competing in the latest edition of Amici di Maria De Filippi. Before it came to television, he discovered and produced it Riccardo Zanotti of the Nuclear Tactical Penguins. We know, more often than not, that today’s avant-gardes are tomorrow’s mainstream and so, thinking back on this whole story, a piece of street art that was visible under the porticoes of Palazzo della Ragione, in time of success Sanremo of. Game Ringo Starr: The personification of the city that took off his hat to six speniscides. Because Bergamo, the Spheniscides in question, would say, above all «hope in the eyes of those who wait / and understand that sometimes in life you just have to wait».