Palazzo Moroni e Giardini

On via Porta Dipinta, a few steps from the Venetian Walls, Palazzo Moroni is a seventeenth-century aristocratic residence with frescoed rooms, period furnishings, a portrait collection and terraced gardens. The FAI manages the complex.

Why it matters

Palazzo Moroni preserves a domestic setting among Bergamo's historic palaces. Six generations of the Moroni family kept the original layout, furnishings and art collection in place, preserving a domestic history from the seventeenth century onward. Count Antonio Moroni entrusted the palace to the foundation he created in 2008; FAI and the foundation agreed on management in 2019.

What to notice

The piano nobile contains rooms frescoed and furnished between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. Giovan Battista Barbelli's mythological frescoes decorate the Sala degli Specchi. The Collezione Moroni includes Giovanni Battista Moroni's portrait of Gian Gerolamo Grumelli, known as the "Cavaliere in Rosa", and the portrait of Isotta Brembati, alongside works by Bernardino Luini, Andrea Previtali, Gianpietrino, Cesare Tallone and the Gozzi and Ronzoni families. The Italian-style gardens descend across three terraces toward Colle di Sant'Eufemia and include a historic orchard, a roccolo formed by hornbeams, and mulberry trees associated with the family's silk production. The nineteenth-century neomedieval "Pensatoio del conte" tower overlooks Bergamo.

Context and history

The Moroni family acquired and rebuilt the palace in the seventeenth century and lived there from 1636 until its transfer to the foundation in 2008. Brothers Pietro and Alessandro Moroni expanded the property in the nineteenth century with a vegetable garden on the slope below. The interior accumulated accordingly: Barbelli's frescoes in the 17th century, the collection of portraits and paintings over subsequent generations, and 19th-century additions such as the tower. In 2008 count Antonio Moroni endowed the Fondazione Museo di Palazzo Moroni with the palace; in December 2019 FAI and the foundation signed the agreement that placed the complex under FAI's restoration, management and enhancement. After restoration work begun in 2020 — with regional co-funding — and an earlier opening of the gardens in the pandemic summer of that year, the palace was inaugurated in full on 22 November 2023.