The Display at Colle Aperto

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The Evolutionary Stairway

 

If you happen to see the lotus, papyrus, carnivorous sundew in the Madagascar Palm company, the sanguisorba orobica, sugar cane, of candelabra cactus, you’re probably in the Botanical Garden of Bergamo “Lorenzo Rota”. That is not the Tower of Babel plant, but rather a small fiefdom of the Kingdom of Plants, where the representatives of the main categories have been collected conveniently to be used by botanists in order to divide the more than 250,000 species of our planet.

In the Botanical Garden of Bergamo, as seen in its logo, you can found the strong footprint of man: it is done with artifice, study and constant care that makes the difficult coexistence possible among more than 1,200 taxa within an area of only 2,400 square meters, of much less than that of a football field. Rich in plants, but not very extensive, the Botanical Garden of Bergamo, that the magazine “Gardenia” called “the hidden gem” set in the ring of the Venetian walls, was visited in recent years, between March and October, by nearly 20,000 visitors.

To the Botanical Garden, you can only reach by foot: you must leave the traffic, noise and anxiety at the base of the Colle Aperto Stairway, near the seventeenth-century polveriera. Once you arrive, you are rewarded with a beautiful view over the rooftops, monuments of the Upper Town and the foothills of the Bergamo Alps. The Botanical Garden of Bergamo, for its evocative nature, helps to bring the public closer to the world of plants and to arouse respect for nature. It conducts conservation of endangered plants and carries out reintroduction projects of endangered species in the wild. Among the latter, has had a good success related to the reintroduction of Osmunda Regalis, a fern that the physician and botanist Lorenzo Rota, the first researcher of the flora of Bergamo, had reported in 1853 in Val Calepio and along the river Adda: fern, which in recent decades resulted disappearance, it was reintroduced in the same places a dozen years ago.

The Botanical Garden of Bergamo also exchanges with other botanical gardens seeds, fruit and spores collected within its areas or in kind. Visited by numerous of school groups, who come followed by their teachers and educators, and the public who’s attracted by on-going exhibitions.

The visit to the Botanical Garden starts from the base of the stairway of Colle Aperto where you will find the evolutionary scale, of the evolution exhibition that tells the history of plants with touch panels also suitable for blind and visually impaired.

The Botanical Garden “Lorenzo Rota Bergamo” is in the Upper Town, on a rampart at the north-west of the seventeenth-century Venetian walls (of Castagneta bulwark). To get there you must travel a long but comfortable ladder of 141 steps. Once there, the quiet and the views are priceless