A travellers guide to Bergamo, Atalanta and the ghosts of yesteryear by Mao

You may have heard somewhere that Merthyr Tydfil FC pulled off one of the all-time great European cup giant-killings in 1987. A team recently relegated from Serie A but also Coppa Italia finalists came to Penydarren Park to play little old us and ended up heading back to Bergamo pointless and with a greater respect of Welsh football, crowds and more importantly hospitality. The return visit two weeks later was another close game, but the hosts hung on to scrape through to play OFI Crete in the next round.

Those of us who had the opportunity to follow the Martyrs into Europe will never forget those weeks when we were both the talk of football fans everywhere and unlikely ambassadors as the first British club to visit Italy since the Heysel disaster a couple of years earlier.

We didn’t see a lot of the city when we arrived for the game, security was tight and the carabinieri were taking no risks, holding us on our buses inside a stable block and the stadium itself was an oval bowl of terraces with just one main stand so a very basic venue although the home fans certainly made the atmosphere memorable with a giant tifo flag and our first sight of pyrotechnics lighting up the sky.

Atalanta have recently become very successful despite their limited resources as a provincial club within Italy. Antonio Percassi bought the club in 2010 and further cemented its link with the region by declaring that every baby born in Bergamo will get an Atalanta shirt and a branded carton milk. Pierluigi Gasperini’s tenure as Head Coach can be compared to Paul Michael at the Martyrs, upsetting better funded clubs to take their respective clubs to higher levels; Atalanta won the UEFA Europa League in Dublin and Paul Michael led us to the National League North.

Maybe you want to revisit Bergamo to the city and the new stadium, or you’ve heard the tales and would like to tread in the footsteps of an older generation of Merthyr fans, if so then you’ll be visiting a brilliant city with a unique football culture.

There are of course direct flights with Ryanair to Milan Bergamo but unless you’re willing to make the never-ending trek to Stansted then a better option to investigate other airlines’ services to the two other Milan airports at Linate and Malpensa.

Over the New Year period I headed off to Italy to see a few games, obviously with an Atalanta game included as a focus for the week. We chose flights from Birmingham into Milan Linate with easyjet, decent fares, and a flight time of just under 2 hours.

There are plenty of airport transfer buses into Milan and especially to Centrale rail station, the average travel time is about 25 minutes, and the cost is around €10. Best way to book rail tickets is via the Ticketline App which also shows Italian rail options including the more direct express trains which operate to Bergamo. Travel time is about 50 minutes.

Bergamo rail station is directly in front of the Città Bassa (the lower town) so it’s perfect for exploring the city as soon as you arrive. We stayed at the Best Western Hotel Piemontese which is the first hotel you find when you cross the road outside the railway station. It’s a tidy hotel and as mentioned it’s very convenient for the city and for any onward travel options.

 

I did try to book us into the Hotel Excelsior San Marco for our stay so I could recreate the famous rooftop photo of Wayne Jones & Co from 1987, sadly the hotel was full when we went to visit, the rooftop has now been renovated into a cool bar area which was of course closed during our visit. Maybe next time.

You’ll note the hotel used by our heroes almost 40 years ago on the right as you walk up to one of the city’s unique attractions, the Funicolare Bergamo Alta which connects the lower town with the Città Alta. It only costs €1.30 for the 5-minute journey up the 52% slope. It’s well worth the trip just to see the view from the Piazza Mercato delle Scarpe but the upper town is worth a wander and like all Italian towns and cities the churches are worth visiting to be entranced by the stunning décor of the interiors, the Basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore is the best in my opinion. The catholics certainly know how to decorate.

You’ll obviously need a pint or two at some point and The Tucans Irish bar directly opposite the funicolare railway is a decent watering hole with some great food available too. All the bars in the Alta Città are small but worth popping into as you wander the narrow cobble streets of the area. It’s Italy so you’ll be able to see the pizza and bakery outlets on every street with the best food you’ll ever taste.

You’ll need to return to the lower town to visit the stadium of course, it would be impossible to build a football ground amidst the historic streets of churches and chapels in the upper town, so back on the funicolare railway down to start the walk to the Bergamo Arena.

A few of us tried to go and see Atlanta play a home midweek game against Bologna a decade or so ago but we missed our flight due to traffic deadlock on the M4 to Bristol airport. The next available flight meant that we arrived almost as the final whistle went in that game, the closest we came to experiences the atmosphere of a Serie A game was watching the buses of Bologna fans being escorted out of the city by a dozen or so carabinieri vans. We did however have a great drink into the early hours in The Ritual pub which filled up with post-match drinkers who took pity on us and bought us beers and pizzas.

The Ritual pub is still there and to be honest it hasn’t changed since that visit; it’s a great starting point for the walk to the stadium. Firstly, you can get a pint and some bar food there but also you can follow the trail of Atalanta fans making their pilgrimage to see La Dea in action. The walk takes about thirty minutes and there are very few bars until you almost reach the stadium itself.

The Bergamo Arena looks very different to when we visited nearly four decades ago. The success under Gasperini required the club to share his ambition and update the old stadium into a UEFA compliant venue for a team that seems to qualify for Europe every season now.

We got tickets via the Atalanta BC website for the game. Roma being the visitors. We were a bit late booking so the tickets were a bit pricey, and we ended up in the old main stand which is still in place as the roof has mosaics that are protected by law that could not be upgraded. The floodlight design is clever in that they are built into a rectangle frame that lies along the roof of both ends of the stadium and then lie above the two shorter stands along the touchlines.

The current away end in the stadium occupies the part of the stadium we had during that game on 30^th September 1987. The big concrete steps now replaced by the stickered plastic glass and nets of the typical Serie A visitors’ sector. A bit like the CTM Stand at PP if our security measures intensify any further.

Atalanta fans have the same advantages as fans at Penydarren Park on a match day as you can drink beer and watch the game although I wasn’t able to get a Caffrey’s Stout there.

The atmosphere was brilliant, plenty of flags. Noise, a few pyros when they scored and Nerazzuri managed to win the game despite a late fight back from Roma.

During the New Year week, we also took in games at Como, the best view for a football stadium in Europe surely, and Pisa. It was noticeable that there were a lot of Germans at all the games and the same lads we met on the train back from Como were sitting in front of us at Atalanta, a quick chat confirmed that they were VFB Stuttgart fans and it’s a tradition for German fans to use their winter break over New Year to do a bit of groundhopping around Italian grounds during the first week of January.

It’s still crazy to sit back and recognize that our own heroes played at this stadium, albeit in a different football landscape to the one we know now.

It was an evening game so the walk back into the town started with scooters flying everywhere, plenty of crowds spilling into the roads but after a few blocks everyone seemed to disappear and so by the time we reach The Ritual the place was deserted. A few pints to celebrate of course were sunk.

If Cob & chips with curry sauce is Merthyr Tydfil’s food of choice, then in Bergamo it will be the local region’s Casoncelli which is a stuffed pasta that is served in every restaurant in the city. According to the locals there is only one Casoncelli alla Bergamasca. It’s worth ordering when you get the menu.

We arrived in Bergamo on New Year’s Eve and went out to celebrate the arrival of 2026 which was wild. There’s a display in the Alta Città at midnight but the action is down in the lower town where the whole population seems to gather with their own fireworks which are thrown and fired indiscriminately everywhere. There’s no way it would be allowed in Wales although it did remind me of the chaotic scenes around the bonfires in Swansea Road and Trefechan back in the day. If you’re planning for 2027 celebration, then Bergamo will not disappoint.

 

Bergamo is not difficult to reach, as mentioned previously there are direct flight but it’s still accessible via Milan airports. A quick detour around the Duomo in Milan can be easily included in the travel plans via Centrale rail station, there’s also a great bar just off the main square called imaginatively The Football Bar which serves Newcastle Brown Ale on draught, which is a thing of beauty, it’s also got some Merthyr Town stickers on its walls which surprised me at the time. They’ve got a couple more now.

Atalanta are part of our history but whether you’re old enough to have been there or have just read and heard the stories Bergamo is well worth a visit; beer, food, religion and of course football, in whatever order you fancy.

Chairman Mao