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Stories from the lake

Lake timeline

Two thousand years of the lake in order of date: from the Roman road along the western shore to the first steamboat, from the fall of the Isola Comacina to the Olginate dam. Each date leads to the story that tells it and to the place where it happened.

Dates
82
Stories
27
Periods
6
Como harbour with the jetty and moored boats, the cathedral dome on the right and the Brunate hill behind the town.
Photochrom Print Collection · Public domain

31dates

Antiquity

To the 5th century · 2 dates

  1. 1st century

    The Roman road along the western shore

    A Roman road links the river port of Cremona with Chiavenna by way of Milan and Como, running up the western shore of the lake towards Raetia, the province beyond the Alps. Its line is that of the Regina road, which remains a paved mule track for fifteen centuries.

    Place: ComoStory: The Regina, the road of the western shore

    Colonno from a drone, the Isola Comacina and the Tremezzina shore beyond, the Regina running between the houses and the water.

  2. AD 61 or 62

    Pliny the Younger is born

    The nephew of Pliny the Elder, who later adopts him, is born at Novum Comum, ancient Como. In his letters he describes the spring that rises and falls several times a day, the one at the Pliniana, and two villas of his on the shore of the Lario, which he calls Tragedy and Comedy.

    Place: ComoStory: The two Plinys of Lake Como

Middle Ages

6th century to 1449 · 4 dates

  1. 643

    Rothari's Edict names the Comacine masters

    Two chapters of the law of the Lombard king Rothari deal with the magister commacinus and settle who must pay for the damage if a house built by a master collapses. The name most probably means builders and stonecutters from the Como area, but its meaning is not settled.

    Place: ComoStory: The Comacine masters

    The Isola Comacina from above: a tongue of wooded land in the blue lake, with meadows and a white building towards the point and a strip of gravel on the shore; behind, the far shore with houses along the water, and at the bottom roofs and green branches.

  2. Urban II consecrates Sant'Abbondio

    Outside the walls of Como, along the old Via Regina, the Benedictines have been rebuilding the church of Sant'Abbondio since 1010: a nave and four aisles and twin bell towers beside the apse. Pope Urban II, passing through Como, consecrates it.

    Place: Basilica of Sant'AbbondioStory: The Comacine masters

    An arched window in the pale stone wall of the apse: the frame is carved with dense interlaced bands, two slender columns carry the inner arch, the jambs alternate white and grey blocks and the glass is patterned with circles; above runs a sawtooth band beneath an interlaced frieze.

  3. The comballo, the lake's cargo boat

    The comballo already appears in a document that forbids the boatmen of Lake Como to go into partnership with one another. Twenty to thirty metres long, flat-bottomed and with a single square sail, it carries Moltrasio stone, sand, lime and wood for the kilns.

    Place: ComoStory: The stone of the lake

  4. The first recorded flood in Como

    The lake comes into the town: it is the first flood on record, in a ducal letter of 20 September. After it the bridge at Lecco is given a tenth arch, in 1434, to let more water out of the lake.

    Place: ComoStory: When the lake comes into town

Renaissance and foreign rule

1450–1699 · 6 dates

  1. 1457–1486

    The façade of Como Cathedral

    From 1452 the cathedral works use white marble from Musso, which becomes their main material. The façade, begun in 1457, is completed in 1486 with the rose window.

    Place: Como CathedralStory: The stone of the lake

    The Duomo's marble apses and dome under a September sky.

  2. By 1498

    The two Plinys on the cathedral façade

    The brothers Giacomo and Tommaso Rodari complete the two aedicules on either side of the main doorway: Pliny the Elder sits on the left, Pliny the Younger on the right. In 1578, at the height of the Counter-Reformation, the statues survive an attempt to remove them.

    Place: Como CathedralStory: The two Plinys of Lake Como

    The aedicule of Pliny the Elder on the front of Como cathedral, protected by a glass case: the marble statue seated in a niche between two carved columns, a book on his knee; below, two reliefs between small caryatids, a garland held by putti and a stone tablet with a Latin inscription; around it, the grey marble blocks of the façade.

  3. The castle of Nesso is destroyed

    In the war against the Medeghino, the castle that Como had built in 1449 above the gorge of Nesso is destroyed. What remains is a wall up to fifteen metres high.

    Place: San Lorenzo Castle, NessoStory: The Medeghino, lord of the lake

    The castle's crenellated walls with an ivy-covered turret, on the grassy top, above the blue lake and the mountains of the far shore.

  4. 1565–1570

    Cardinal Gallio's villa at Cernobbio

    Cardinal Tolomeo Gallio, born at Cernobbio, has a summer residence built on the lake to a design by Pellegrino Tibaldi. In 1815 it is bought by Caroline of Brunswick, who names it Villa d'Este.

    Place: Villa d'Este, CernobbioStory: The century of the grand hotels

    Villa d'Este's long pale front on the shore, with yellow awnings on the ground floor and Cernobbio's houses on the hill behind.

  5. A villa around the Pliniana spring

    Count Giovanni Anguissola, governor of Como, buys the land at Torno where the spring described by Pliny the Younger rises, and builds the villa there in three years. In the loggia two inscribed slabs carry Pliny's letter, in Latin and in Italian.

    Place: Villa Pliniana, TornoStory: The two Plinys of Lake Como

    The yellow villa on the shore below the rock face, with the white waterfall coming down through the greenery behind it.

  6. The lake enters Como Cathedral

    During the flood the water reaches the steps of the high altar inside the cathedral. Two plaques, in Via Volta and Via Diaz, record it; in 1703 the lake reaches the cathedral again, as far as the organ piers.

    Place: Como CathedralStory: When the lake comes into town

Eighteenth century

1700–1799 · 4 dates

  1. 1711–1753

    The Carloni brothers remake the church at Scaria

    The brothers Diego and Carlo Innocenzo Carloni remake the church of Santa Maria for Scaria, their home village, with stucco and frescoes. They are among the artists of the Val d'Intelvi who work all over Europe: Carlo Innocenzo also paints in Ljubljana Cathedral and in the palaces of Vienna.

    Place: Santa Maria and Museum of Sacred Art, ScariaStory: The Comacine masters

    The nave with walls and vault covered in stucco and frescoes, down to the high altar at the end.

  2. Alessandro Volta is born

    Volta is born in Como, in the house in Via Volta where he will die in 1827. As a young man he does his first experiments in Canon Gattoni's laboratory, in a tower of the town walls; in 1778 he takes the chair of experimental physics at the University of Pavia.

    Place: ComoStory: The battery, the fire and the Tempio

  3. Joseph II shelters at Blevio

    Caught by a storm on the lake, the Emperor Joseph II takes shelter in a house on the shore at Blevio. In the second half of the nineteenth century the ballerina Maria Taglioni retires there, and the villa takes her name.

    Place: Villa Taglioni, BlevioStory: The musicians' lake

  4. Late 18th century

    Silk leaves the home

    After three centuries as cottage work, with silkworms reared at home and thread spun in winter, silk processing moves into mills along the streams, which provide the power. In the nineteenth century Como becomes one of Europe's leading silk centres.

    Place: Silk MuseumStory: Como silk

    Hanks of silk yarn dyed in shades of blue, hanging on a wooden rod; spools of other colours behind.

Nineteenth century

1800–1899 · 9 dates

  1. Volta announces the battery

    In a letter to Joseph Banks, President of the Royal Society in London, Volta announces a new device: a column of discs of different metals, separated by pieces of card soaked in salt water. He had built it in Como at the end of 1799; from its shape it is called a pila, a pile.

    Place: Tempio VoltianoStory: The battery, the fire and the Tempio

    The Tempio Voltiano in Como on a clear day: four Corinthian columns carry the entablature inscribed “A·Volta” and a pediment with a medallion, two white statues stand in niches, winged figures sit at the corners of the roof and the dome rises behind; at the base an arch with a basin, in front a round flowerbed ringed with bollards and chains, on either side trees clipped into domes and two lamp posts, and on the right, beyond the trees, the lake and the mountains with a village.

  2. Shelley looks for a house at the Pliniana

    From Milan, Percy Bysshe Shelley writes to his friend Thomas Love Peacock that he has been to Como to look for a house. The landscape he likes best is that of Villa Pliniana, half in ruins, which he and Mary hope to obtain; the negotiations come to nothing.

    Place: Villa Pliniana, TornoStory: The writers' lake

  3. The first steamboat

    The Lario, a wooden paddle steamer launched on 29 July from the Olmo beach at Borgo Vico, begins daily runs between Como and Domaso. A journey from Como to Colico, which under sail and oar could take a day or two, now takes a few hours and keeps to a timetable.

    Place: Villa OlmoStory: Two hundred years under steam

    The paddle steamer Concordia under way, black funnel and the villas of the shore behind.

  4. Bellini at Moltrasio

    The Cantù and Turina families rent Villa Salterio at Moltrasio, where Giuditta Cantù carries on her affair with Vincenzo Bellini. These are the years in which the composer writes La straniera and La sonnambula; a plaque on the villa's façade records it.

    Place: Villa Salterio Erker, MoltrasioStory: The musicians' lake

    The three-storey lilac villa on the road, with grey shutters, the decorated pediment at the top and a plaque on the front; on the left a balustraded terrace, on the right the arch spanning the road.

  5. The highest level on record

    The lake rises to 3.97 metres above the zero of the Malgrate gauge, the highest level ever recorded, and about a third of Como ends up under water, including the whole area around the walls.

    Place: ComoStory: When the lake comes into town

    Piazza Cavour in Como seen from the water on a summer day: the lake comes to within a few steps of the square's paving, with piers, white motorboats and a red-and-white boat moored; on the left nineteenth-century buildings in pink and ochre with their awnings down, behind the roofs the green dome of the cathedral, a stone tower and a spire; in the middle the open square with trees, flowering shrubs, lamp posts and people strolling, and round it modern buildings of several storeys.

  6. The year of the grand hotels

    Villa d'Este, at Cernobbio, becomes a hotel. In the same year the Frizzoni family's neoclassical villa at Bellagio opens as the Grand Hotel Bellagio, and Antonio Mella opens the Hotel Grande Bretagne on the Bellagio lakefront.

    Place: Villa d'Este, CernobbioStory: The century of the grand hotels

    The villa seen from above among the cypresses and trees of the park, with the blue lake and the far shore behind.

  7. 1880s

    The fence against smuggling

    The Guardia di Finanza builds a long wire fence along the Swiss border, the ramina, with an alarm of bells fixed on springs. Smugglers cross the border in secret with the bricolla, a jute sack holding up to thirty-five or forty kilos of cigarettes, salt or coffee.

    Place: Lanzo d'IntelviStory: The smugglers' lake

    The church of San Lucio on the pass, against a low sun: walls of stone and flaking plaster, an arched porch and two arched niches, a roof of stone slabs and the bell tower with its open belfry, the sun breaking out beside it; around it the pasture grass and, far off, the mountains in a golden haze.

  8. The Brunate funicular

    The funicular between Como and Brunate, designed by the engineer brothers Villoresi, opens to the public. Planned to run on water, by gravity, it works instead with a steam winch because there is not enough water; in 1911 it switches to electric motors.

    Place: Como–Brunate FunicularStory: When the railway reached the lake

    The red car of the Como–Brunate funicular climbing, the city below.

  9. The Volta Exhibition burns

    A spark from two electric wires sets fire to the wooden pavilions of the exhibition built on the lakeshore for the centenary of the battery: they burn in less than an hour, with many of Volta's relics. Within a month the engineer Eugenio Linati rebuilds them, and the exhibition reopens on 20 August.

    Place: ComoStory: The battery, the fire and the Tempio

Twentieth century

1900–1999 · 6 dates

  1. Hitchcock shoots his first film on the lake

    For ‘The Pleasure Garden', his debut as a director, Alfred Hitchcock sets the heroine's honeymoon on the lake. The Villa d'Este hotel, the Isola Comacina and the Civera bridge at Nesso can all be recognised.

    Place: NessoStory: The lake on film

    The Ponte della Civera at Nesso: a single-arched stone humpback bridge over green water, leading to stone houses with red doors and shutters; a few people are crossing it; on the left, a wall covered in ivy.

  2. The physicists' congress for the Volta centenary

    Sixty-one physicists meet in Como, Pavia and Rome, among them the young quantum physicists: Pauli, Heisenberg, Fermi, Dirac. At the congress Niels Bohr first sets out the principle of complementarity; the Como sessions are held in the science room of the Istituto Carducci, later called the Nobel room.

    Place: Istituto Carducci and the Nobel RoomStory: The battery, the fire and the Tempio

    The Istituto Carducci's facade on the avenue, its tall windows and early twentieth-century decoration behind the trees.

  3. The Tempio Voltiano opens

    The industrialist Francesco Somaini gives the city the Volta museum on the lakefront, designed by Federico Frigerio with an explicit nod to the Pantheon. A plinth more than two metres high protects it from floods; inside are original instruments of Volta's.

    Place: Tempio VoltianoStory: The battery, the fire and the Tempio

    The interior of the Tempio Voltiano seen from the gallery: a frieze of green marble runs round the rotunda with an inscription in gilded letters, “…Francesco Somaini offriva…”; below, grey marble columns with Corinthian capitals, the balcony with figured reliefs and medallions bearing dates, from 1790 to 1800; at the bottom the mosaic floor of coloured marbles, dark green display cases with instruments, a white bust on a pedestal of yellow marble hung with a wreath of leaves, and windows open onto greenery.

  4. The Novocomum, Como's first rationalist building

    Giuseppe Terragni completes the Novocomum, an apartment building with a curved volume on the corner that the people of Como nickname ‘the Ocean Liner'. Between the wars Como becomes one of the centres of Italian rationalism.

    Place: NovocomumStory: Palazzo Terragni, rationalism beside the cathedral

    The Novocomum at the crossroads, its rounded corner and balconies under a blue sky.

  5. Terragni completes the Casa del Fascio

    Fifty metres from the apse of the cathedral, Giuseppe Terragni completes the Como headquarters of the National Fascist Party, designed in 1932: a square of about thirty-three metres a side, faced in white marble, with no cornices or decoration. The building has since taken the name Palazzo Terragni.

    Place: Palazzo Terragni (former Casa del Fascio)Story: Palazzo Terragni, rationalism beside the cathedral

    The front of Giuseppe Terragni's Casa del Fascio in Como, seen square-on from the piazza, with a person in a yellow raincoat.

  6. The flood of the year of the Valtellina disaster

    The lake reaches 2.64 metres above the Malgrate zero, the highest level since it has been regulated, reached again on 15 October 1993. With the dam Piazza Cavour stays flooded for 30 days; without it, it would have been 85.

    Place: ComoStory: When the lake comes into town