Como

Como's old town is enclosed on three sides by its medieval walls, still largely intact, and opens onto the lake on the fourth. Inside the walls the streets run straight and cross at right angles, following the plan of the Roman town. From the south you enter through Porta Torre, the forty-metre gate built in 1192 on the road to Milan.

On Piazza Duomo the cathedral and the Broletto, the palace of the medieval commune, stand side by side. The cathedral was begun in Gothic style in 1396 and completed in 1740 with Filippo Juvarra's dome. On either side of its main doorway sit statues of Pliny the Elder and Pliny the Younger, two pagan writers born in Como. The Broletto, from 1215, is banded in white, grey and red marble; behind it stands the Romanesque church of San Giacomo. A few steps away, San Fedele has three apses set out like a clover leaf and the Dragon doorway.

In the Iron Age a large settlement of the Golasecca culture stood on the hills south-west of the present town. Rome conquered the area in 196 BC. In 59 BC Julius Caesar refounded the town on the lakeshore as Novum Comum and settled five thousand colonists there. Pliny the Elder and his nephew Pliny the Younger were born here in the first century AD. In 386 Saint Ambrose consecrated Felix as the first bishop of Como.

Outside the walls the Benedictines rebuilt the basilica of Sant'Abbondio in Romanesque style, and Pope Urban II consecrated it in 1095. It has five naves, twin bell towers and an apse frescoed in the fourteenth century. The commune, formed towards the end of the eleventh century, fought Milan for ten years, and in 1127 the Milanese destroyed the town. Como then sided with the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa and, with his help, rebuilt the town and its walls. In 1335 it passed to the Visconti, the lords of Milan.

In the early fifteenth century the Rusca, a Como family, ruled the town for some years; in 1416 it returned to the Visconti, and in 1450 it passed to the Sforza. In the sixteenth century the historian Paolo Giovio built a museum at Borgo Vico, on the lake, for his collection of portraits of famous men. Together with the Duchy of Milan, Como was Spanish from the sixteenth century and Austrian from the early eighteenth. In 1676 Benedetto Odescalchi, born in Como, was elected pope as Innocent XI.

In 1797 Napoleon stayed at Villa Saporiti, and the town became the capital of the Department of the Lario. Two years later Alessandro Volta, born in Como in 1745, invented the voltaic pile, the first electric battery; he died in Como in 1827. In March 1848, during the Five Days, the people of Como forced the Austrian garrison to surrender. On 27 May 1859, after the battle of San Fermo, the Austrians left the town to Garibaldi's Cacciatori delle Alpi.

Piazza Cavour, open to the lake, takes the place of the old harbour, filled in during the nineteenth century; the boat piers lie in front of it. To the west, the lakeside gardens lead to the Tempio Voltiano, the museum devoted to Volta built in 1927, and to the war memorial. From the shore a breakwater runs out to Life Electric, Daniel Libeskind's steel sculpture unveiled in 2015. A little further on, in front of the hangar of the Aero Club, founded in 1930, seaplanes take off from the water.

The promenade follows the shore past Villa Saporiti to Villa Olmo, the neoclassical villa of the Odescalchi family, begun in 1782 and owned by the city since 1925. From there the Chilometro della Conoscenza continues through the parks of Villa del Grumello and Villa Sucota. On the opposite shore, the funicular to Brunate leaves from Piazza De Gasperi, and Viale Geno ends at the point of Villa Geno, with its fountain in the lake.

Between 1927 and 1940 Como was one of the centres of Italian Rationalist architecture, and its leading figure was Giuseppe Terragni. The Novocomum, the block of flats Terragni finished in 1929, stirred controversy in the town because of its shape, and locals called it the Transatlantico, the ocean liner. Between 1933 and 1936 Terragni built the Casa del Fascio, later renamed Palazzo Terragni: half a cube of white marble and glass facing the apse of the cathedral.

The war memorial, unveiled on the lakefront in 1933, grew from a drawing by Antonio Sant'Elia, the Futurist architect from Como who was killed at the front in 1916; Terragni simplified the design. A little further on stands the Canottieri Lario rowing club, built by Gianni Mantero in 1931. In the San Rocco district Terragni built the Asilo Sant'Elia nursery school between 1935 and 1937, with large windows onto the garden. The Novocomum and the Casa del Fascio are working buildings: they are seen from the outside.

In the Middle Ages Como worked mainly in wool. Silk arrived in the sixteenth century: in 1510 Pietro Boldoni, from Bellano, opened the town's first silk-throwing mill. Como has been weaving and printing silk since the late eighteenth century. In the surrounding countryside people grew mulberry trees and reared silkworms, the reeling mills drew the thread from the cocoons, and in the town weaving was done by hand, often at home.

Between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries power looms arrived and the work moved into factories. In 1868 the Comune opened a school of silk making, which became the Istituto Paolo Carcano; in its basement the Museo Didattico della Seta keeps looms, dyeing machinery and original prints. In 2021 UNESCO named Como a Creative City for crafts and folk art.