In Città Alta, in the heart of the historic center is the Carmine Monastery.
An architectural gem with an ancient history but a whole new vitality.
Designed in the first half of the 14th century by Carmelite fathers, it was built in the late 15th and early 16th centuries, and in the 17th century the stables, chapter house and a new library were built.
The heart of this majestic structure is the rectangular cloister, with a portico of round arches supported by columns with composite capitals surmounted by pulvinus and set on a low wall.
On the second floor are architraved loggias.
It was with the 18th century that the monastery entered a period of decay and neglect, and the premises and cloister were equipped to become apartments for rent.
In 1954 it was declared uninhabitable and work began on static consolidation of the structure.
In recent years, thanks to major restoration work, the monastery has returned to show all its beauty and has regained its place in the fabric of the city.
Today, in fact, it is managed by TTB – Teatro Tascabile di Bergamo, a historic international theater company, which obtained it in concession from the City of Bergamo and has made it its headquarters by taking care of the place and making it possible to use it for cultural events, shows and concerts.
The Carmine Monastery (15th century) is a public cultural asset of great historical and artistic interest.
It is located in the historic center of Bergamo, on the northern side of Città Alta.
The building, deeply involved in the urban development of the city, gathers into an accomplished building organism a series of architectural pre-existences developed since Roman times.
The time frame of its construction, which began in the second half of the 1300s, saw the period of maximum activity between the late 1400s and early 1500s with the construction of most of the cloister, refectory, and monks’ quarters, effectively concluding in the second half of the 1600s with the construction of the stables, Chapter House, and new library.
A 20-year period of static consolidation work began in 1956.
In 2018, Teatro Tascabile signed with the City of Bergamo the first Special Public Private Partnership (PSPP) in Italy for the recovery and enhancement in a cultural key of the Monastero del Carmine through the project #yourCarmine.
The upgraded spaces are sharing places for research, training and artistic production, where pedagogical projects, seminars, meetings, residencies, performances and open rehearsals with national and international groups can develop.
Environments available to the city, where cultural participation of citizens can be fostered, generating opportunities inside and outside the Monastery.
These places are therefore conceived to host different and seemingly distant experiences that can meet in a common house, a crossroads where everyone can leave their experience, human and artistic, in a multidisciplinary perspective (theater, music, dance, cinema, visual arts).