La Priula Street is a historical itinerary that retraces, in a hiking and touristic way, the route of the ancient Priula Road, one of the most important road works built by the Venetian Republic in the Bergamo Alps.
The original road was built in the 1593 by the will of the Venetian Podesta Alvise Priuli, with the aim of connecting Bergamo at Valtellina through the San Marco Pass, then known as Morbegno ridge. In this way, the Serenissima intended to ensure a direct and secure connection to the Alpine territories and transalpine trade, avoiding the Spanish control exercised over the Duchy of Milan.
More than a simple mountain road, the Priula was a strategic work of great modernity: a carriage road designed with advanced engineering criteria for the time, equipped with bridges, retaining walls and paved sections, capable of making practicable environments that until then had been difficult to cross.
Today, the route known as Via Priula does not always coincide precisely with the original seventeenth-century route. The transformations of the modern road system, the abandonment of some mountain areas and the natural evolution of the territory make inevitable a reconstruction that, while inspired by historical sources, integrates sections of the path, mule tracks and ancient dwellings still legible in the landscape.
The contemporary Via Priula is thus to be understood as a itinerary of memory: a path that follows the spirit and function of the historic road, allowing you to pass through villages, passes and alpine environments that tell of the central role of the Val Brembana as a corridor of exchange, trade, and transit between the Po and Rhaetian worlds.
To walk along the Via Priula is to immerse oneself in a history made up of merchants, armies, travelers and local communities, in a landscape that still preserves the traces of one of the most ambitious infrastructure projects in the Bergamo area.
