DOur path leads through centuries, millennia, above and sometimes also below the earth. It’s a magical journey in the Museo di Santa Giulia in Brescia, housed in the former nunnery of San Salvatore-Santa Giulia, founded in 753 by King Desiderius and his wife Ansa, and now part of the World Heritage Site “The Lombards in Italy”. Breathtaking art treasures have their generous stage here, thousands alone in the monumental rooms of the monastic universe, testimonies of cultures that came and went, built next to, inside and on top of each other, used sarcophagi, columns, capitals and inscription stones from predecessors for their buildings. Unforgettable is the oratory of Santa Maria in Solario, the sky painted in the dome by Floriano Ferramola, the consecration cross, magnificent goldwork of the eighth century known as the Cross of Desiderius.
We also see marvels of the Renaissance, the murals in the choir of the nuns and the Basilica of San Salvatore, the crucified martyr Santa Giulia, a sculpture of bewildering iconic power. From the footbridges we look at frescoes and magnificent floor mosaics of Roman villas like in Pompeii. In the Capitolium, the most sacred temple of yore, we are alone with the bronze statue Vittoria alata, a sculpture full of grace and strength, despite the age of almost two thousand years. It was found in 1826, hidden in a cavity in the temple above the forum, a sensational find. And Vittoria with the wings of an angel would become the proud symbol of Brescia.
A pair of cities as cultural capitals: Brescia – here the Piazza della Vittoria – and Bergamo have joined forces.
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Bild: picture-alliance
Every city is an adventure, and an unfamiliar one can be special. We came for the World Heritage alone, Brescia itself meant nothing to us. How many times had we passed here halfway between Milan and Venice. But then we decided to stop – and the first walk from the hotel through the city justified it. We passed palazzi and piazzas, under domes and towers, monumental churches and monasteries. Piano music rang out from the Luca Marenzio Conservatory, while the luxury shops along Corso Zanardelli left no doubt that Brescia is a good place to live and it knows how to live. But most people in the north don’t know that.
Brescia’s patron saint: the Roman goddess of victory Vittoria alata
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Image: Hartmut Hallek
The Italians know better. For them Brescia is the “Leonessa d’Italia”, the lioness of Italy. That’s what the poet Aleardo Aleardi and the Nobel Prize winner Giosuè Carducci called the second largest city in Lombardy – honor and memory of the glorious popular uprising of the city of 1849 against the Habsburgs and for the freedom of Italy. For the Italians, Brescia is also Brixia, the Roman settlement, and also the cradle of the Mille Miglia, for Enzo Ferrari “the most beautiful car race in the world”.
Further north, the news situation is thin. There is Franz Kafka’s “Die Airplane in Brescia” from 1909, the first description of airplanes in German-language literature. With Kafka, powered flight was only a few years young and this air show with Henri Rougier’s altitude record of almost two hundred meters was a sensational spectacle, a dawn of a new era on the Montichiari airfield. People were drawn to daring pilots and their quirky flying objects, including aviation pioneers Glenn Curtiss and Louis Blériot, who had just flown first across the English Channel. And everyone was there: the world star Giacomo Puccini, the womanizer Gabriele D’Annunzio, ladies of the Italian aristocracy and Parisian society, Kafka’s friends Max and Otto Brod, thousands of others.
To this day, the city at the foot of the Alps is a center of industrial innovation, a cosmopolitan region, thanks to its economy globally intertwined as far away as China. But that is exactly what should be her undoing in spring 2020: Brescia and neighboring Bergamo were one of the first cities in Europe to be hit hard by the pandemic. The pictures and news of this earliest corona wave went around the world. Despair left behind the virus, sadness and loneliness. But soon people wanted to leave the gloomy times behind, and so Brescia and Bergamo jointly applied as “Capitale Italiana della Cultura 2023”, as Italy’s cultural capital. The competitors withdrew out of solidarity, a fine move, in July the contract came from Rome. “Siamo Capitale Culturale” has been the motto in Brescia and Bergamo ever since, for the first time a pair of cities is the cultural capital.