The first piles
Copper and zinc of 1800 — the mother battery itself.
Melancholia~itwiki — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Maurizio Moro5153 — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Maurizio Moro5153 — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Maurizio Moro5153 — CC BY-SA 4.0
On Como's lakefront stands a domed neoclassical temple to no god but a scientist: Alessandro Volta, son of the city and inventor of the battery — the man who gave humanity continuous current and lodged his name, the volt, in every language on earth. Como raised it in 1927 for his death's centenary as a unique secular shrine: marble, dome and columns to the memory of first electricity. Inside is a concentrated museum: Volta's original piles — the copper and zinc discs that ignited the electric age — his instruments, letters, and the medal Napoleon pinned on him in personal admiration. The circular upper floor overlooks hall and lake at once. A half-hour visit at the exact tip of the waterfront gardens where the villas walk begins: science opening the promenade — a fittingly Comasque arrangement.
Copper and zinc of 1800 — the mother battery itself.
A unique secular shrine — a city deifying its physicist son.
Viale Marconi, 22100 Como
Giardini a Lago (Como Lakefront Gardens)Como waited roughly seventeen years to get its own waterfront back. The strip be1 minute walk4.3
Como-Brunate FunicularSeven minutes, five hundred metres of altitude. That is the whole of what the Co8 minutes walk4.5
Como CathedralComo's cathedral is Italy's last Gothic cathedral and its first Renaissance one 9 minutes walk4.6
Villa OlmoVilla Olmo is Como's grandeur open to all: the town shore's greatest neoclassica11 minutes walk4.4
Porta TorreA twelfth-century gate tower at the southern edge of Como's historic centre, and15 minutes walk4.2A Comasque (1745–1827) who crowned a scientific duel with Galvani by inventing the pile in 1800: the first source of continuous current — opening the door to all electricity after. Napoleon honoured and decorated him, the world named voltage's unit for him — and Como named nearly everything: square, temple, lamps.
At half an hour, yes — for families, science lovers and promenade walkers anyway passing — and it is Como's distinguishing touch among lake towns: where others raise monuments to sailors, Como raised one to a battery.