The Birthplace where Gaetano Donizetti was born in 1797 is a place of historical and cultural value. The oldest part (the rooms inhabited by the Donizetti family) dates back to the 14th – 15th centuries and has retained its original appearance: Ideal backdrop for imagining daily uses and behaviors of the past. Since 2009, after an intervention that made it fully accessible, Casa Natale, under the management of the Donizetti Theater Foundation, has been open to the public.

Identified thanks to the research carried out by Ciro Caversazzi published in 1924, the house where Gaetano Donizetti was born is a 5-story building dating back to medieval times. The slope of the hill on which Borgo Canale stands means that from the street that crosses it only 4 floors can be seen, while from the street downstream (today’s Via degli Orti) there are 5 floors above ground. The Donizettis lived precisely in the basement, which began as an open porch but was later enclosed and subdivided into living quarters and service rooms for the entire building: a hallway, with a woodshed, well and icebox on one side, and on the other – downstream – a two-room apartment.

Purchased by the City of Bergamo in 1925 thanks to a public subscription promoted the year before, in 1926 the building was declared a National Monument as being “of historical interest”. Uninhabited from 1929 to the mid-1930s, the building became a home again until the mid-1960s. On the occasion of the first centenary of Donizetti’s death (1948), and then in 1973, the basement was restored and opened to the public. In 2007, restoration and renovation work on the entire building was initiated by the City of Bergamo, leading to its full opening in 2009. Its refurbishment was entrusted to the Donizetti Foundation.