The history of Como

A palazzo keeps Garibaldi's boots and battle relics

The building beside you holds Garibaldi's boots, letters, and battle relics from a war fought two hundred kilometres away — but the museum itself opened in 1932, inside the 15th-century Palazzo Olginati, donated by its family so Como could keep something of the man who passed through in 1866 during the final push of Italian unification. The first Garibaldi relics went on display here as early as 1884, gathered by admirers before the city had anywhere formal to put them.

A few steps further, the Museo archeologico Paolo Giovio shares the same address and courtyard, its cases holding what the ground under this district has surrendered over the centuries — Roman glass, Lombard grave goods, the small debris of two thousand years of continuous settlement on this exact patch of the city.

Just south, the Liceo Alessandro Volta was founded in 1804 and still teaches in a building named for the man who invented the electric battery — a Comasco whose memorial stands two hundred and sixty metres from here, one of two monuments to him within the same short walk.

The city walls themselves — the Mura di Como — run one hundred and ninety metres away, medieval stonework that in places was built directly over the foundations of the Roman city they replaced. Under Piazza Vittoria and the streets radiating from it, the old Roman colony of Novum Comum lies in fragments: a Roman bath complex and the stone ring of a Roman arena both sit within three hundred metres, mostly unseen now beneath later paving, their existence known chiefly from the digs that found them.

A Romanesque basilica stands on far older ground

A short walk north, the Basilica of San Fedele has stood in something like its present Romanesque form since 1120, built over an earlier church on a site of worship stretching back further still — one of the oldest continuously sacred spots in the city, one hundred and seventy-seven metres from where you are.

Further out, Casa del Fascio (Como) was raised in 1936 as the local headquarters of the National Fascist Party — a stark modernist landmark by Giuseppe Terragni that survived the fall of the regime it was built to serve, and after 1945 became the seat of the National Liberation Committee instead. It stands not far from the medieval Broletto, Como's 1215 town hall, and the soaring Duomo, whose construction spanned centuries and swallowed the site of an older cathedral.

Nearer at hand, the Pinacoteca Civica occupies the 17th-century Palazzo Volpi, a former private residence turned public gallery, holding paintings that trace the city's tastes from the Renaissance onward.

To the south, the Basilica of Sant'Abbondio has held its Romanesque form since the 11th century, one of the great surviving works of the region's medieval builders, and beyond it the city's cemetery holds the more recent dead of Como, a quieter counterpart to the Roman and medieval bones the archaeological museum keeps on shelves closer to where you stand.

Jurassic limestone and glacial ice shaped this basin

The ground beneath all of this — the palazzi, the basilicas, the museum cases of Roman glass — is Southern Alps limestone laid down some 180 million years ago in a shallow Jurassic sea, later overlaid by gravel and sand dropped by ice-age glaciers as they carved the basin that Lake Como now fills. The lake itself, a short distance north beyond Como Nord Lago station, exists because of that glacial carving; the city grew on the delta of sediment the glaciers left where the water meets the land, a geography that has decided everything else — the Roman road, the medieval walls, the railway lines, the tourists on the promenade — for two thousand years.