Bergamo

Bergamo is the secret that the people priced out of Milan have started to discover, and the rest of us were not supposed to find. Forty minutes northeast of Milan, it does something almost no Italian city manages: it gives you a beautiful, walled, medieval hilltop town and a busy, modern working city, stacked one above the other. The locals split them by name, Città Alta, the upper town on the hill, and Città Bassa, the lower city below. You get the postcard and the practical life in the same place.