Via Pignolo Basso

I’ve been walking up and down via Pignolo on the way to the Pam grocery store on the via Camozzi; it’s about a 10 minute walk.  The first part, from my apartment down to via Verdi, is mostly a descent on a narrow sidewalk along a herringbone-patterned brick street flanked by forbidding exteriors to what seem to be old, old palazzi.

I’d been seeing the portion below via Verdi mostly as an extension of this, more closed-off palazzi with occasional glimpses of interior courtyards.  But yesterday afternoon I stopped in at a cartoleria (stationary and school supplies store) in the the lower street to buy some postcards.  The store was wonderful.  When I went in, I felt like I’d stepped back 50 or 60 years.  It could have been next door to my grandfather’s Woolworths in Normal, Illinois.    The couple in the store, several years older even that I am, added to the atmosphere.  I wouldn’t say it was museum-like, but I wished I could have spent more time exploring what all they had for sale.

When I went back outside, somehow an ice had been broken.  Going back up the street towards my apartment, passing the small shops, I was struck by a variety I hadn’t noticed before.  As is probably true in any neighborhood here, the street includes several bars (Italian style, probably serving more coffee and snacks than alcohol) and beauty salons.  But it also includes Antica Legatoria, selling hand-made notebooks and providing book-binding services; Bag and Shoes, whose name describes it; Ready to Win, offering model airplane, car, etc. kits; Studio Matteo Pontiggia for guitar repair; Il Negozio, a shop selling arts and crafts to raise funds for autism support; Tip Tap, a children's shoe store, and one of the busier stores in the street.  Plus a couple of women’s clothing stores, a shoe repair and key duplicating store, a real estate office, a branch of the Bergamo library system, and more. In all, evidence of a real neighborhood.

This was reinforced by the number of fathers and mothers with small children, walking or on bicycles.  It’s hard to know what’s behind the blank building facades, but it must be that many include apartments with young families.
 
As I say, quite different from my initial impression.