Bergamo in the context of "Harlequin"

The Republic of Venice was dissolved and dismembered by the French general Napoleon Bonaparte and the Habsburg monarchy on 12 May 1797, ending approximately 1,100 years of its existence. It was the final action of Napoleon's Italian campaign of 1796–1797 before the War of the First Coalition formally ended in October.

In 1796, General Napoleon had been sent by the newly formed French Republic to confront Austria, as part of the Italian front of the French Revolutionary Wars. He chose to go through Venice, which was officially neutral. Reluctantly, the Venetians allowed the formidable French army to enter their country so that it might confront Austria. However, the French covertly began supporting Jacobin revolutionaries within Venice, and the Venetian Senate began quiet preparations for war. The Venetian armed forces were depleted and hardly a match for the battle-tested French or even a local uprising. After the capture of Mantua on 2 February 1797, the French dropped any pretext and overtly called for revolution among the territories of Venice. By 13 March, there was open revolt, with Brescia and Bergamo breaking away. However, pro-Venetian sentiment remained high, and France was forced to reveal its true goals after it provided military support to the underperforming revolutionaries.

An orthophoto, orthophotograph, orthoimage or orthoimagery is an aerial photograph or satellite imagery geometrically corrected ("orthorectified") such that the scale is uniform: the photo or image follows a given map projection. Unlike an uncorrected aerial photograph, an orthophoto can be used to measure true distances, because it is an accurate representation of the Earth's surface, having been adjusted for topographic relief, lens distortion, and camera tilt.

Orthophotographs are commonly used in geographic information systems (GIS) as a "map accurate" background image. An orthorectified image differs from rubber sheeted rectifications as the latter may accurately locate a number of points on each image but stretch the area between so scale may not be uniform across the image. A digital elevation model (DEM) or topographic map is required to create an orthophoto, as distortions in the image due to the varying distance between the camera/sensor and different points on the ground need to be corrected. An orthoimage and a "rubber sheeted" image can both be said to have been georeferenced; however, the overall accuracy of the rectification varies. Software can display the orthophoto and allow an operator to digitize or place linework, text annotations or geographic symbols (such as hospitals, schools, and fire stations). Some software can process the orthophoto and produce the linework automatically.

Mantua (/ˈmæntjuə/ MAN-tew-ə; Italian: Mantova [ˈmantova] ; Lombard and Latin: Mantua) is a comune (municipality) in the Italian region of Lombardy, and capital of the eponymous province.

In 2016, Mantua was designated as the "Italian Capital of Culture". In 2017, it was named as the "European Capital of Gastronomy", included in the Eastern Lombardy District (together with the cities of Bergamo, Brescia, and Cremona).

The province of Bergamo (Italian: provincia di Bergamo; Bergamasque: proìnsa de Bèrghem) is a province in the Lombardy region of Italy. Its capital is the city of Bergamo. The province has a population of 1,103,768 (2023), an area of 2,754.91 square kilometers (1,063.68 sq mi), and contains 242 comuni (municipalities).

Domenico Gaetano Maria Donizetti (29 November 1797 – 8 April 1848) was an Italian composer, best known for his over 70 operas. Along with Gioachino Rossini and Vincenzo Bellini, he was a leading composer of the bel canto opera style during the first half of the nineteenth century and a probable influence on other composers such as Giuseppe Verdi. Donizetti was born in Bergamo in Lombardy. At an early age he was taken up by Simon Mayr who enrolled him with a full scholarship in a school which he had set up. There he received detailed musical training. Mayr was instrumental in obtaining a place for Donizetti at the Bologna Academy, where, at the age of 19, he wrote his first one-act opera, the comedy Il Pigmalione, which may never have been performed during his lifetime.

An offer in 1822 from Domenico Barbaja, the impresario of the Teatro di San Carlo in Naples, which followed the composer's ninth opera, led to his move to Naples and his residency there until production of Caterina Cornaro in January 1844. In all, 51 of Donizetti's operas were presented in Naples. Before 1830, success came primarily with his comic operas, the serious ones failing to attract significant audiences. His first notable success came with an opera seria, Zoraida di Granata, which was presented in 1822 in Rome. In 1830, when Anna Bolena was first performed, Donizetti made a major impact on the Italian and international opera scene shifting the balance of success away from primarily comedic operas, although even after that date, his best-known works included comedies such as L'elisir d'amore (1832) and Don Pasquale (1843). Significant historical dramas did succeed; they included Lucia di Lammermoor (the first to have a libretto written by Salvadore Cammarano) given in Naples in 1835, and one of the most successful Neapolitan operas, Roberto Devereux in 1837. Up to that point, all of his operas had been set to Italian libretti.

Evaristo Baschenis (7 December 1617 – 16 March 1677) was an Italian Baroque painter of the 17th century, active mainly around his native city of Bergamo.

Eastern Lombard is a group of closely related variants of Lombard, a Gallo-Italic language spoken in Lombardy, mainly in the provinces of Bergamo, Brescia and Mantua, in the area around Cremona and in parts of Trentino. Its main variants are Bergamasque and Brescian.

In Italian-speaking contexts, Eastern Lombard is often called as dialetti (lit. 'dialects'), understood to mean not a variety of Italian, but a local language that is part of the Romance languages dialect continuum that pre-dates the establishment of Tuscan-based Italian.

Giovanni Battista Parodi (1674–1730) was an Italian painter, born in Genoa. He belonged to an Italian family of artists. His father was the sculptor and wood-carver Filippo Parodi (1630–1702). His brother was Domenico Parodi (1672–1742), a painter, sculptor and architect.

In Genoa his frescoes are to be seen in the Church of Santa Maria Maddalena, but he spent most of career in Milan and Bergamo. He added church ceilings in Milan, contributed to the decoration of churches in Bergamo and to the Palazzo Mazzoleni in Bibbiena. In Rome, his sole prominent public commission was for the fresco of the ceiling of San Pietro in Vincoli in 1706 and the vault medallions (c. 1706) in Santa Maria dell’Orto, Rome.