Of all the places I've been in Europe, for some reason Bergamo fills me with sentimentality. I've been there a couple of times. I really enjoy it but there's something else. I feel fond of it. People don't go there, Bergamo is treated like a budget airline stop-off for Milan, so it's kind of like an elderly neighbour that nobody calls in on any more. I love the place. Every time I've been it has been cold and damp and exactly what I want. I never think of Italy as the blazing hot, dusty Mezzogiorno Italy. Italy, for me, is an autumn place and nowhere beats Bergamo for feeling the seasons roll into winter.

I was exhausted. Verona and Brescia and now Bergamo. The train stopped on the outskirts for ages and all I wanted to do was be there. I felt like shit, I had a fever and I could feel my anger and anxiety rocket. But when the train pulled into the station and I got off it, got out the station, got past the shithole that has 500m that surround every train station in Europe, I got a last burst of energy. I was struggling with the weight of just a tiny rucksack but all I wanted to do was hurry.

I went down about a million flights of stairs and out into the little square below. It was cold but the rain had eased off and I couldn't tell if it was drizzle or just drips from the ancient eaves funnelled into the narrow lane. I was getting hungry and headed to a place I'd wanted to go the last time I'd been here. The streets were empty and I could hear opera being sung, drifting down from the Teatro Sociale. You couldn't tell the direction, it was all around and faded in and out like the clouds above.

I found the place, Trattoria Da Ornella. It was old and plain but did traditional Lombardy food. That's what I needed, something you'd know you'd eaten. I ordered roast rabbit and polenta, it was obviously for two and I stuffed in the whole lot. Rabbit, veg, polenta, bread, half a bottle of wine and a couple of Aperols. The only way to beat the illness was to knock the shit out of it.

You can't eat badly here unless you make an effort. Bergamo is a food place. It's got a big place in the local character and the town is full of shops and bakeries and restaurants that appreciate food and produce and ingredients. This isn't some vibey hipster artisan con. This is old food, food from the land. Nothing that is going to appear on Vice or have dopey millenials posting an Instagram wank about. There are no "brave" or "challenging" fuckwits with beards and bad tattoos running a Kitchen With Rooms. The person cooking your food is probably a 60 year old fat lady that has raised three generations. She knows what you need.

A big disappointment was missing the world cheese festival the day before. If I'd known, I'd probably have fucked off Brescia and came here and stuffed myself into an early grave or a diabetic coma. Instead, I had to walk around the next day seeing discarded cheese brochures and trails of cocktail sticks as the stalls were being dismantled.

Citta Alta, the upper town, isn't the highest part of Bergamo. There's another peak beyond that and you reach it by another funicular. Last time I'd been here I'd gone looking for it (I love a funicular) but couldn't find it and wandered round chasing signs up side streets. It's actually really easy to find, you just follow the main pedestrian street that runs from the Piazza Vecchia, Via Colleoni, as far as you can go, through Piazza Citadella and out into a little open area with gardens, a viewpoint and a big bus stop. There's a newspaper kiosk and across the road, on the other side of the bridge, is the funicular station. It's also the spot where the airport bus departs from.

The funicular climbs up the side of another peak. I sat in the carriage with a French family. The father and son sat there staring at their phones but the mother looked around her, interested in everything. It was a lonely sight. It's a grey day, one for reflection, and I felt sad for her. I'd known that same loneliness. We create a world where the ones not staring at something are the ones that stand out.

I got out at the top station. The city, and the whole plain of Lombardy beyond, were in front of me. All the domes and turrets and towers of the old town. Monday morning going on in the new town. In the distance you can see planes coming and going at the airport. If you go up the hill it takes you to the remains of a castle and the path runs along the outer wall. I couldn't figure out how to get inside. At the end is a weird 1970's fountain, abandoned and out of place. There was no-one there. I love wintery, lonely parks. In Three Days of the Condor, one of my favourite films, Faye Dunaway takes pictures of empty parks in winter. I can never work out why but the photographs always get me.

The old church of San Vigilio sits on a little hill next to the funicular station. It was closed. I waited for the next carriage down, glad that I had come. San Vigilio is a slightly bleak, lonely and quiet place. On a wet autumn morning, it was what I was looking for.

I sat in the clattering train with a smile on my face.

Another thing that Bergamo has no shortage of is churches. They are everywhere and they all start merging into one. Looking through my pictures I couldn't tell you which one was which from the interiors. Standard Italian baroque. There's nothing really special about the insides unless you like that kind of thing. I don't. But the outsides are stunning.

Strangely, the most low key of them all was the cathedral. It's on the left just as you go through the Venetian gate in the Piazza Vecchia and you'd easily go past it if you didn't know. It just looks like a fancy church from the outside. Inside, nothing special, kind of what you expect Donald Trump's living room to look like. But the one thing that I wouldn't miss, in a really ghoulish way, is the crypt. It's a very weird place, looks like the hypersleep chambers from the Alien films. There's a big horseshoe of tombs where the bishops of Bergamo are interred. A few of them are vacant and I found that creepier than the occupied ones. If you're bishop, you know this is where you are ending up, you see it every day and you know the only way out of the job is when you take your place down here.

Across the square from the cathedral is the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore. The basilica goes back to the 1100's when it was built on top of the 7th century original basilica which is why the church is in the Greek cross shape. It's a real mish-mash of pieces, stuff that has been bolted on over the centuries, pieces missing that have been demolished. Even the Venetians had a crack it, the fancy porches with Venetian lions give it an eastern, almost Arabic, feel. Next to it is the ugly Colleoni Chapel. In the late 1400's the Venetian governor, Giovanni Colleoni, demolished the sacristy to build his own private chapel and tomb. It's still privately owned today. The chapel is opened to the public but it's open grudgingly. There are signs everywhere, no photos, no hanging around, no paupers, no undesirables. Five hundred years later the owners of this place still think they are important.

Italy is the Saudi Arabia of Catholicism. There are plenty of other churches to mooch around as well. Santa Agata on Via Colleoni is worth a look and every time I've been has actual nuns. I live in a place where you never see nuns, seeing real ones is like seeing a giraffe outside of a zoo.

One of the things I love about Bergamo is that it is the perfect place for someone like me. I like to look round corners and wander down alleys to see where they go and this is the town for that kind of thing. There is interesting stuff everywhere. I came across an old building and when I poked through the front doors it opened out onto one of the best viewpoints there was. Up another side street was a weird building with heavy security and when I took a couple of pictures a bunch of black-suited guys appeared so I retreated. Turned out it was a seminary founded by a local pope, John XXIII. What they are doing in there that needs security like that? Who knows but it can't be good.

Apart from visiting every single public toilet in Bergamo just to make sure I hadn't shit myself in the last half hour, I spent the rest of the day just mooching about. It's funny, there's lots to see but nothing to tell. I don't know what I was looking at. It's just such a pleasant place to walk about. Sneaking into a little garden near the Citadella. Finding the spot where the rich of the town left bottle of wine for the poor. I stood in the courtyard of an abandoned building just looking at nature reclaim it. In the lanes behind the Sant'Agata church is what was the old prison. In another backstreet is a window that looks in on the city's Roman foundations. You'll walk round a corner and see a beautiful fresco on a crumbling wall. Bergamo really is a city for the curious and maybe even for the nosey.

It broke my heart watching what unfolded during spring of 2020. Bergamo was one of the hardest hit places from coronavirus. The death rate was nearly 6 times the annual average. The cemeteries and crematoria couldn't cope with the body count and corpses were shipped elsewhere for disposal. News reports were filled with images of military convoys removing the dead from the town. I said at the start of this article that Bergamo reminded me of an elderly neighbour I liked but don't see much. I feel the same way about what happened to it as I would feel if it happened to my neighbour. It's a place I had happy times in and met some nice people that I wonder what happened to. Did they survive? I know that either way I will never see them again. Bergamo, on a cold, damp Autumn day, is a place that makes me happy but there's always something sad in the air and I don't know why. Maybe the sense of time passing that will never come back.

Getting there: Bergamo has an airport in the outskirts of town, very close by. You can see it from the old city and you could probably walk to it if you had to. Buses run regularly, I think every twenty minutes or something. Takes about 30 minutes. It has stops at the train station, in the middle of the lower town, at the base station of the funicular and outside the San Vigilio funicular. There are vending machines for tickets, it's just a standard city bus ticket, nothing fancy. The San Vigilio funicular stop is perfect, right on the edge of the old town.

There is also a train station in the south of the lower town. It's maybe a 30 minute walk or so to get to the funicular for La Citta Alta. Milan is an hour away by train but why would you want to?

Getting Around: the funiculars are quick and cheap but you can walk if you really want to. I'd recommend at least once walking either up to or down from the upper town. You don't see the Venetian fortifications otherwise, the walking route takes you right along, and through, them. There is a big Venetian gate that you'd miss completely. The airport bus line is also a good way to get around. It stops at all the main points that you'd want to go to both in the upper and lower towns. You can buy tickets from the vending machines, punch the ticket as you get on the bus.

Where I stayed: I stayed in the B&B Torre della Meridiana, a B&B in the top of a mediaeval tower. It's a fantastic place and I hope the owner survived everything that happened. He was the nicest guy I met on the trip. The place was great and the breakfast was fantastic.

Left Luggage: the B&B owner let me dump my bags there but there is a left luggage place in the Citta Alta, in the Torre di Adalberto near the aiprort bus stop and San Vigilio funicular. It also had my favourite toilet and I think it saved me from shitting myself about three times.

Food: I ate dinner at Trattoria Da Ornella on the main street in the old town, just up from the Piazza Vecchia. The guy that runs it was a bit of a miserable twat but the food is great. There is a chain of bakeries in Bergamo called Nessi that does really good takeaway food. They have a great range of cheap pizzas by the chunk and really nice cakes. There is a branch just up from the funicular top station. The place I really wanted to go but didn't get the chance is a restaurant called Da Mimmo. It gets great reviews and cooks really traditional Lombardy food.