The house where Volta used to live
His Native House is located in the historic centre of Como, Via Alessandro Volta. He was born there on February 18th , 1745. The next day he was baptized in the nearby Provostal church of San Donnino with the names of Alessandro Giuseppe Antonio Anastasio. He died in the same house in 1827. On the right of the main door of the house number 62, lies the tombstone with the inscription: “This was the ancestral home of Alessandro Volta”.
(Picture caption: Alessandro Volta's birth act, San Donnino church)
Volta’s family also had other residences whose references are in the epistolary of Volta. The villa in Campora, today’s Camnago Volta - in its honour - just outside the centre of Como, is the place where the scientist used to go on holiday in the summer months.
The Volta farm was situated in the current oasis of Bassone, now supervised by the WWF association. From this place, you can observe the gasses of the marshes, or methane discovered by Volta in 1776 in Angera on the Lake Maggiore.
In the villa of Gravedona, however, on the shores of the Como Lake, he spent some vacation periods during his teen years. He went back there in 1794 for his honeymoon.
In this chromolithography by George Barnard you can see a nineteenth-century view of Como, as it must have appeared to Volta, who was deeply in love with his hometown.