ADRIANO BERNAREGGI MUSEUM

The Adriano Bernareggi Museum has been open since September 2000 in the renaissance Bassi Rathgeb palace donated by the Rathgeb heirs to the Diocese with the specific obligation to house a museum. The original core of the collections was collected, with great foresight, starting in the 1930s by Bishop Adriano Bernareggi, then Bishop of Bergamo. It mainly reflects the culture of the 16th - 19th centuries in the Bergamo area and essentially illustrates the period from the Council of Trent to Vatican II. While exhibiting and re-examining its collections, the Bernareggi Museum fosters a better understanding of the historical and cultural environment in which almost all the artistic heritage in the Bergamo area was born. This is not a nostalgic operation, but an exercise in memory, an indispensable tool for understanding the present and thinking about the future. The museum's exhibition is composed of liturgical objects alongside images of worship from churches and oratories as well as from private homes, as from homes and households come the many documents of popular piety that testify to the widespread presence of common rites and customs. Fragments of decorations from churches and convents alongside the many portraits of clergy representatives and evidence of the presence of the Church in Bergamo and the Diocese lead the narrative of a history with its own peculiarities and rhythm. The strongly didactic vocation has led to a layout conceived as an itinerary in chapters and themes and to the offer of numerous multimedia tools for a more layered and flexible comprehension to every type of approach, from the hasty to the more demanding.