ElectricLife Atellani
 Captain
Flight distance : 9674836 ft
Italy
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San Pellegrino Terme is a comune in the province of Bergamo, Lombardy, Italy. Located in the Val Brembana, it is the location where beverage company San Pellegrino, and its carbonated mineral water drinks are produced.
The town is home to several Art Nouveau edifices from the early 20th century, including the Casinò, the Grand Hotel and the Terme or thermal baths.
Leonardo da Vinci visited the source in Lombardy to sample the town’s miraculous water.
They say that San Pellegrino is “the gem of the Brembana Valley”, and it is, indeed! The art nouveau palaces, the historical spa with the thermal baths, the San Pellegrino plant, renowned all over the world for its mineral water and beverages: and there’s so much more!
The Thermal Baths were built in 1840 and turned a small village of the valley into an outstanding holiday resort for the wealthy international middle class. The health spa was enlarged at the end of the XIX Century with some buildings in art nouveau style, called “Liberty”, the artistic trend featuring curve lines and arabesques. In just a few years, this art movement captivated the whole village of San Pellegrino, enriching it with some of the finest examples of Liberty style, including the majestic Casino, the Grand Hotel and the water bottling factory.
Most of these buildings can still be visited; some of them have been recently restored and opened back to the public. The Spa, for instance, now belongs to an elegant wellness centre combining the Liberty architecture with a contemporary and elegant design.
San Pellegrino thrived between the XIX and the XX Century, utterly absorbing the characteristics of the Belle Époque: a widespread optimism and a new desire for lightness and fun.
For about twenty years, San Pellegrino became the core of Bergamo’s fashionable life, and beyond, thanks to its Thermal baths, the Casino and the Grand Hotel, the sophisticated meeting point of the rich industrial middle class looking for amusement. The infrastructures benefited from these positive circumstances, as well: besides the railway connecting the village to Bergamo, in 1909 also a funicular was built, in order to overcome the 300 meters of altitude difference separating it from the hamlet of Vetta.
Nevertheless, with the First World War also came a decreasing in the flow of tourists, which continued for the years after the World War II and led to de eventual closing of the Grand Hotel. On the contrary, the water industry never experienced any downturn: San Pellegrino kept on investing on it through the bottling process, thus creating a worldwide renowned trademark.
Today you can go back in time and live the very same splendour of the early XX Century, enjoying the recently restored, enlarged and implemented Wellness Centre, within a project that also includes the luxurious Casino’s renewal.
Vigevano is crowned by the Castello Sforzesco, a stronghold rebuilt 1492–94 for Ludovico Maria Sforza (Ludovico il Moro), the great patron born in the town, who transformed the fortification/hunting lodge of Luchino Visconti (who in turn had re-used a Lombard fortress) into a rich noble residence, at the cusp of Gothic and Renaissance. Leonardo da Vinci was his guest at Vigevano, as was Bramante, who is ascribed with the tall tower that watches over the piazza from the Castello Sforzesco. The old castle has a unique raised covered road, high enough for horsemen to ride through, that communicates between the new palace and the old fortifications; there is a Falconry, an elegant loggiato supported by 48 columns, and, in the rear area of the mastio, the Ladies' Loggia made for Duchess Beatrice d'Este.
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