Como

Known for

Como Cathedral, the Tempio Voltiano and Villa Olmo are one walk: first the walls, then the lakefront to the west.

Why go

In the morning, before the boats fill the quay. The lakefront still works in the evening. The cathedral is better before noon.

Where to stay

Sleep inside the walls if you want the water first thing. Brunate, up the funicular, is a walk. The suitcase stays down here. The villas further up the lake are other towns.

Places

• Como–Brunate Funicular — Opened in 1894, this funicular replaced a laborious mule-track ascent with a rapid climb of roughly 500 vertical metres. It helped turn secluded Brunate into a Belle Époque resort filled with hotels, restaurants and extravagant villas.
• Como Cathedral — A floor plaque commemorates an easily forgotten side of Volta: according to tradition, the elderly scientist attended Mass here every day. It was installed in 1999 for the bicentenary of the battery.
• Palazzo Terragni (Casa del Fascio) — Giuseppe Terragni’s former Fascist Party headquarters is considered a masterpiece of Italian Modern Architecture. Its later occupants chart Italy’s political reversal: liberation parties first, then the Finance Police.
• Basilica of San Fedele — One week after Volta’s death, Como held a civic tribute to him inside this basilica. A commemorative poem commissioned for the occasion led young priest Tommaso Bianchi to write the inventor’s first biography, helping turn Volta into a public legend.
• Basilica of Sant'Abbondio — An off-the-beaten-track Catholic basilica in Como, dating to the 11th century and built in the Romanesque style.
• Broletto — Como’s medieval town hall was deliberately placed between the cathedral and the bishop’s palace, with a bell calling citizens to public assemblies. Political violence and the cathedral’s expansion later left the building burned, shortened, and missing its external staircase.
• Casa Bazzi — Casa Bazzi joins three medieval houses shaped in phases between the twelfth and seventeenth centuries. It is a rare survivor of the Cortesella, Como’s once-crowded old quarter near the lake.
• Coloniola Waterfront Quarter — The streets between Sant’Agostino and Como’s funicular cover the city’s former port and trading quarter. Boats and workshops have given way to a waterfront shaped by nineteenth-century redevelopment and tourism.
• Como Civic Art Gallery — Como’s town art gallery, housed inside the 17th-century Palazzo Volpi on Via Diaz.
• Como Silk Museum — A museum in Como devoted to silk, located in the San Martino district.
• Frederician City Walls — These surviving defenses mark Como’s comeback after Milanese forces demolished the earlier walls in 1127. Rebuilt with imperial support from 1158, the enlarged circuit followed the Roman city and still preserves a long, reinforced southern stretch.
• Life Electric — Daniel Libeskind’s contemporary sculpture on Lake Como, dedicated to physicist Alessandro Volta and completed in 2015.
• Novocomum — Novocomum is the apartment block Giuseppe Terragni slipped past the authorities using conservative-looking plans, only to unveil a radically avant-garde building behind the scaffolding. The resulting scandal became an early battle over Italian Rationalism.
• Piazza San Fedele — An intimate medieval square believed to occupy part of Roman Como’s forum. Later used as a grain market, it still keeps the porticoes and projecting timber houses of the old walled city.
• Porta Torre — Como built this formidable gate tower after Milan demolished the city’s Roman defenses. Completed in 1192, it faced the road to Milan like a 40-metre declaration that Como was back in business.
• Roman Baths of Como — Beneath a modern parking structure lies roughly 1,500 square metres of Roman bathing rooms. Elevated walkways carry visitors above one of the clearest surviving fragments of everyday life in ancient Como.
• Roman Gate of Como — Beneath a school lies the main southern entrance to Roman Novum Comum, uncovered by accident in 1914. Its paired carriageways and octagonal towers reveal a defensive route that shaped Como for centuries.
• Teatro Sociale — Como’s neoclassical theatre has survived construction disasters, overcrowding, conversion into a cinema, and structural closure. In 1944, it even became the substitute opera house for Milan’s war-damaged La Scala.
• Tempio Voltiano — A Neoclassical museum on Lake Como dedicated to local physicist Alessandro Volta, inventor of the first electrical battery. Its collection includes Volta’s original scientific instruments, personal belongings and honours.
• Villa Geno — A peaceful Lake Como waterfront that has served as a religious settlement, a leper hospital, an aristocratic villa and, finally, a municipal park. Its postwar fountain can send water roughly 45 metres above the lake.
• Villa Olmo — Villa Olmo became the main exhibition ground for the 1927 centenary of Volta’s death. Temporary pavilions connected his experimental pile to hydroelectric power, telephony, telegraphy, and the vast electrical industries that followed.
• Albergo Terminus — An Art Nouveau hotel opened in 1902 as Como’s working waterfront was becoming a fashionable lakeside resort. Its original role also included a bathing establishment serving the neighboring Palace Hotel.
• Alessandro Volta High School and Science Museum — Volta studied at the institution’s predecessors and later taught experimental physics there—though all of that happened before the school occupied this building. Its science museum grew from instruments donated by Volta’s friend Gattoni.
• Alessandro Volta’s Birthplace (Palazzo Volta) — Alessandro Volta, inventor of the electric battery, was born and died in this ancestral house. A blocked arch in the medieval wall recalls the private passage he was allowed to open for direct access home.
• Casa Giuliani-Frigerio — Giuseppe Terragni’s last completed building, designed while he was serving in the Italian army. Its staggered apartments and restless abstract façades hinted at a new direction that his death in 1943 left unexplored.
• Church of San Donnino — Alessandro Volta was baptized here in 1745, later drew crowds with his Sunday catechism lessons, and returned for his funeral in 1827.
• Church of San Giacomo — This compact Romanesque church once extended almost to the Broletto and may have formed half of a double-cathedral complex. Factional fighting, decay, and drastic remodeling gradually cut it down to the partly hidden building you see today.
• Gattoni Tower — Canon Giulio Cesare Gattoni converted this medieval tower into a physics laboratory, where he and Volta collected atmospheric electricity. Bells and Volta’s gas-firing pistol could announce an approaching storm before the rain arrived.
• Giovio Museum — A purpose-built Renaissance museum that housed Paolo Giovio’s extraordinary collection of 484 portraits of writers, rulers, statesmen, and military figures.
• Monument to Alessandro Volta — Pompeo Marchesi’s marble statue turned Alessandro Volta, inventor of the first electrical battery, into Como’s secular civic hero. Its remarkably brief dedication also helped give the entire square Volta’s name.
• Monument to the European Resistance — A memorial on Como’s lakefront whose dedication deliberately reaches beyond the city—and beyond Italy—to the European Resistance.
• Nobel Room at the Carducci Institute — In 1927, an international physics congress brought an astonishing scientific cast to the Carducci Institute. Eighteen participants had already won or would later win Nobel Prizes.
• Old Como–Brunate Mule Track — This steep stone route was Como’s main connection with the hillside villages before the funicular. It climbs through Garzola toward Brunate, preserving the old, leg-powered geography of the city.
• Piazza Cavour and the Exhibition That Rose Twice — In 1899, a vast temporary exhibition celebrating the battery stretched from Piazza Cavour into Como’s lakeside gardens. A short circuit destroyed it, but the city built a second exhibition in less than two months.
• San Vitale Tower — A roughly 36-metre defensive tower that guarded the southeastern corner of medieval Como. Its stark masonry and sparse openings reveal a building designed for protection, not pageantry.
• Terragni Family Home and Studio — Giuseppe Terragni grew up in this Via Indipendenza house and later opened an architectural practice on the ground floor with his brother Attilio. Work produced here helped turn Como into a center of Rationalism, while Attilio’s political role tied the studio to Fascist municipal power.
• Bruno Pessina Workers’ Houses and Factory Chimney — These workers’ houses and factory chimney survive from the Bruno Pessina silk works, built in the early twentieth century. They preserve a fragment of Como’s industrial labor history among the modern buildings of Borgo Vico.
• Canottieri Lario Clubhouse — A Fascist-era rowing clubhouse built on Como’s reclaimed lakeshore, reportedly in just seven months. Its story combines a mother’s memorial gift, pioneering indoor training and a daring reinforced-concrete diving platform.
• Casa Cattaneo-Alchieri — Pietro Lingeri designed this apartment block as a stack of individual “superimposed villas,” with projecting terraces serving as outdoor rooms. A rooftop addition by Lingeri himself later altered part of his original Rationalist silhouette.
• Casa Pedraglio — A Como apartment house shaped by compromise: two structural bays disappeared during construction, disrupting Terragni’s composition. Postwar alterations—including enclosed shops and an added floor—turned the building into a visible record of changing priorities.
• Church and Former Monastery of Santa Cecilia — This Augustinian monastery once pressed directly against Como’s defenses near Porta Torre. In 1339, its nuns reached a settlement with the commune after part of their property was destroyed to make way for a new gate fortification.
• Church of San Provino — Alessandro Volta married Teresa Peregrini in this discreet little church on September 22, 1794. For a scientific celebrity used to European salons, the low-key setting was a strikingly private choice.
• Como War Memorial — A hidden gem memorial in the city of Como.
• Former Albergo Posta — A compact former hotel shaped by a battle between Rationalist architect Terragni, conservative municipal officials and a demanding commercial brief. Much of the original interior disappeared, but the building and its preserved staircase still carry the argument.
• Former Giovanni Bianchi Silk Workshop — Hand-weaver Giovanni Bianchi opened his workshop here in 1866, filling it with looms and unusually long tables for printing silk and chiffon by hand. The family business later moved outside Como, adopted new technology, and developed into modern export production.
• Former Royal Silk School — Built between 1908 and 1910 for Como’s expanding state silk school, this building provided laboratories and classrooms for the city’s dominant industry. Today it houses the Teresa Ciceri high school, so an important piece of textile history is hiding in plain sight.
• Former Ticosa Silk-Printing Works and Santarella Power House — This striking void in central Como was once Ticosa, a major silk-dyeing and printing complex. Most of it has vanished, leaving the Santarella power house and a northern industrial section as fragments of the city behind the luxury label.
• Former Tintoria Subalpina — Silk was dyed, printed and finished at this Como factory until 1997. Most of the complex later gave way to residences and the Hilton Lake Como, while a former canteen, gatehouse and reconstructed frontage keep its industrial identity in view.
• Hotel Metropole-Suisse Façade — Giuseppe Terragni’s first professional commission was a cautious remodeling of an older hotel façade, begun around the time he graduated. While publicly challenging academic architecture with Gruppo 7, he was still quietly negotiating with its classical vocabulary here.
• Paolo Carcano Silk Institute — Founded in 1868 to train textile workers, the Setificio helped Como compete in international fashion by educating chemists, designers and weaving specialists. Its present campus reflects the silk industry’s shift from inherited workshop skills to technical research and design education.
• Roman Theatre Remains at Via Vitani 13 — Excavations inside an ordinary building revealed structural remains interpreted as part of Roman Como’s theatre. Its ancient seating structure was later buried, quarried and absorbed into the medieval city.
• Sant'Elia Nursery School — Giuseppe Terragni designed this light-filled 1930s nursery for Como’s rapidly growing workers’ district. Its glass walls, garden and carefully arranged rooms reveal the childcare infrastructure behind the city’s textile economy.
• The Underground Valduce Stream at Piazza Matteotti — A stream from Brunate still reaches Lake Como here, but completes its journey beneath streets and buildings. Once prone to flooding this side of the city, the Valduce was diverted and gradually buried.
• Torre Demorata — A medieval house-tower whose name means “lowered” or “truncated.” Local tradition says the victorious Rusca family forced their Vittani rivals to cut it down, while the structure itself reused material associated with a Roman entertainment building buried beneath this quarter.
• Torre Pantera — A layered medieval tower built over the remains of a Rusconi family stronghold that was forcibly cut down in 1292. It recalls the days when Como’s rival clans used private towers as both weapons and very expensive boasts.
• Via Anzani Workers’ Housing — Two apartment blocks are all that remain of an ambitious Fascist-era plan for a self-contained workers’ district at Rebbio. Budget cuts killed most of the scheme, but the buildings’ galleries and orientation preserve the planning ideas of Terragni and Sartoris.
• Where the Cosia Disappears at Via Piave — Here, the Cosia torrent runs visibly beside Via Castelnuovo and Via Piave, then abruptly disappears beneath central Como on its way to the lake. Its covering concealed a flood-prone watercourse that repeatedly damaged the city around it.

Where to have it

• Brillo — Остерия натурального вина: бокал мелких хозяйств, кухня и проигрыватель пластинок в глубине зала. Заходят и на аперитив, и на ужин.
• Fresco Cocktail Shop — Маленькая коктейльная комната Андреа Аттаназио сразу за стенами: два зала, камень и дерево, короткая карта из свежих продуктов и никакой террасы.
• Hemingway — Коктейльный бар у piazza Volta, который город помнит ещё с восьмидесятых. Омар Везентини держит его именно баром: бокал и стойка, не ресторан и не вид на озеро.
• Il Cortiletto — Коктейльный бар в стороне от моды, куда в центре ходят засидеться. Комната работает с 1992 года и не гонится за новой вывеской.
• Pronobis — Боттега в центре, куда ходят за бокалом небольших итальянских хозяйств и за едой из лавки: салуми, сыр, сезонная кухня. Её собрал бывший продавец пластинок Карло Мосси с партнёрами, и это свой винный стол города.
• Vineria Vitani — Тихий винный салон с редкими и коллекционными бутылками и полутора десятками мест. Сюда приходят выбрать и попробовать вино, а не на шумный аперитив у озера.
• Vintage Jazz — Джазовая комната у piazza Mazzini: живая музыка, вино и коктейли за одним столом. Её держит Давиде Баллерини.