Serendipity in Bergamo

A mildly disturbed older man is carrying a large sign and pacing back and forth in the piazetta. He looks harmless enough...

The Bergamo funicolare from the lower town to the Città Alta

A mildly disturbed older man is carrying a large sign and pacing back and forth in the piazetta. The sign, loosely translated, says, “Every word of English you add to the Italian language is like a slap in the face of your mother.” Every man has his cause; this one appears harmless enough.

It is a brilliant Sunday in Bergamo, a small hilltop city in the Lombard region of northern Italy. Its 15th century, upper district, the Città Alta, is all quintessential winding cobbled streets encircled by sturdy stone medieval Venetian walls. One rides a little funicolare up the cliff to arrive at the Old Town.

I sit in front of the picturesque little hotel, Agnello d’Oro, at a sunny umbrella table, sharing a pizza with Gabi, a woman I met on the train today. A tall, lanky man walks by our table dragging a wheeled suitcase. He stops and smiles when he hears us talking.

“English!” he says. “Are you Americans?”

Gabi replies, “Belgian.”

I say, “I’m from California.”

He says, “Hey! Me, too! What town?”

“Santa Cruz,” I answer.

“You’re kidding! Me, too!” he says.

We discover he lives about a mile from me back home. How often does that happen? He joins us and eats half of our pizza. Then he buys another one to share. It is like an impromptu family reunion, and all three of us delight in it.

A view from the Città Alta

You have to wonder how these chance meetings happen. How can someone travel over 6,000 miles to a random, lesser-known city, sit in a small random cafe, on a random day and time and run into someone else from their own home town? What kind of astronomical alignment has to be in place?

Actually, these coincidences happen more often than you would imagine. I have accidentally encountered travelers from Santa Cruz several times in Europe. I once bumped into a couple in the train station in Genoa — I had casually looked down at their luggage tag and introduced myself. Once I sat down to rest on the steps of a small church in Vienna and was surprised to see I was sitting next to my mom’s insurance man and his wife. We compared travel notes. And once I stood in line behind a man wearing a UCSC slug-emblazoned T-shirt in a “waffle house” in Amsterdam. He was a student at my old alma mater and lived just down on Ocean Street. Incredible.

In Spanish they have a saying: Dios los hace, y ellos se juntan. “God makes them and they find each other.” That old axiom most often refers to a rabble of drunken revelers.

Apparently it sometimes fits world travelers as well.

The walls surrounding old Bergamo

Rooftops of the Città Alta

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