Tempio Voltiano

The fire that made the museum necessary

In 1899 Como staged a large temporary exhibition to mark the centenary of the invention of the voltaic pile. A fire destroyed it. Many of the original instruments and documents that had been gathered for the display were lost, and the lesson the town drew was that Volta's surviving relics needed a permanent, fireproof home rather than a hall hired for a season. That is the argument this building answers, and it is recorded in the Wikipedia entry on the Tempio Voltiano, read in Q3 2026.

The project gathered momentum as the centenary of Volta's death in 1927 approached. The cotton industrialist and senator Francesco Somaini provided the funding and gave the building to the city; Federico Frigerio designed it. Construction began in 1925, finished in 1927 and the official inauguration took place on 15 July 1928.

A neoclassical rotunda that is not as old as it looks

The building reads as a Roman temple dropped onto the lakefront, which is exactly what a 1920s architect wanted you to think. It has a square base about 26 metres wide and stands nearly 26 metres high, and the circular hall inside is about 12 metres in diameter. Those proportions are the practical fact of the visit: it is one round room with a gallery, and a coach party of thirty fills it. Nothing about the interior takes an hour unless you want it to.

The man it commemorates gave his name to the volt. The pile whose centenary burned in 1899 was the first device to deliver a steady electric current, which places its invention in 1799, and the museum's job is to show you the actual apparatus that produced it.

The collection is made of the original instruments and documents belonging to Alessandro Volta that survived the 1899 fire, shown alongside copies of those that did not. That is the single most useful thing to know before you go in. Some of what you are looking at is the object itself; some is a reconstruction of an object that no longer exists, and the museum is open about which is which. A visitor who expects everything in the case to be an original leaves annoyed. A visitor who knows the story of the fire reads the copies as part of the story.

What you get, case by case, is voltaic piles, capacitors, Leyden jars and electrometers, plus Volta's personal effects and the honours he was given. It is a physics collection, not an art collection, and it rewards anyone who has ever wondered what a battery looked like before it looked like a battery. Children who have met electricity at school get more out of this room than they will out of any villa garden on the lake, which is why it is in the with kids shortlist.

The museum publishes nothing at all about photography, dogs or step-free access. That is a negative finding worth stating plainly: the comune's ticket sheet and museum page carry no accessibility statement, no dog rule and no photography rule. If any of those decide your visit, the number to call is 031 574705 and the address for the civic museums office is musei.civici@comune.como.it.

• Original surviving instruments plus copies of what burned in 1899, labelled as such
• Voltaic piles, capacitors, Leyden jars, electrometers
• Volta's personal effects and the honours he received
• No published rule on photography, dogs or step-free access

The Tempio Voltiano opens Tuesday to Sunday from 10:00 to 18:00, with last entry at 17:30. It closes every Monday, and on 1 January, 1 May, 15 August and 25 December. There is no summer extension and no winter shortening, which makes it one of the few reliable indoor options on the lake in February.

Three dates a year are free to everyone: 18 May, International Museum Day; the National Day of Families in Museums, which falls in October and whose exact date the comune sets each year; and 31 August, the city's patronal feast. The last of these is worth pairing with a warning: 31 August is also a day when Como Cathedral closes to tourist visits entirely, so the patronal feast gives you one free museum and takes away one paid monument.

Beyond the free days, the free categories are wide. Under 6s, disabled visitors with one companion, one teacher per fifteen pupils, journalists and tour guides with ID, ICOM members and holders of the Abbonamento Musei Lombardia all enter free. That last card is also honoured at Villa Monastero across the lake and gets a discount at Villa Carlotta, which is the closest thing this lake has to a museum pass; the tickets index sets out where it works.

• Tuesday to Sunday 10:00 to 18:00, last entry 17:30, every month of the year
• Closed Mondays, 1 January, 1 May, 15 August, 25 December
• Free for all on 18 May, on 31 August and on the National Day of Families in Museums in October
• Free always for under 6s, ICOM members and Abbonamento Musei Lombardia holders

Both sell through museicomo.vivaticket.it, and both print the identical ladder: $6.99 (€6) adult, $4.66 (€4) reduced, $3.50 (€3) for ages 6 to 18, $17.48 (€15) for the Como Family Pass covering one family unit with a maximum of two adults. The reduced band means the same thing in both places: over 65, Como residents, university students and adult groups of fifteen or more.

Where they part company is the calendar. The museum closes on Mondays and keeps the same hours all year; the Cathedral opens Monday to Saturday for sightseeing and suspends it on Sundays under its 2026 calendar. Between them they cover every day of the week except the days when both are shut for a public holiday, and 15 August and 25 December are the two dates when neither will let you in.

The practical routing that falls out of this table: do the Cathedral on a weekday morning and the museum on the Monday when the Cathedral's tourist route is quietest but the museum is shut, or the reverse. If your only full day in Como is a Sunday, the museum is open and the Cathedral's paid route is not, so the Sunday itinerary is the rotunda plus the free nave loop, and the one-day plan is built around that.

The building is one circular room about 12 metres across with a gallery above, so the length of the visit is decided entirely by how much of the labelling you read, not by how far you walk. Nobody needs a plan of this museum.

The address is Viale Marconi, 22100 Como, on the lakefront west of Piazza Cavour, telephone 031 574705. The comune's own ticket sheet gives no walking directions at all, which for a building this visible is not a problem: from the Como piers it is about eleven minutes on the flat lakefront path, from Como Lago station about twelve, and from Como San Giovanni about fifteen downhill. From Como Cathedral it is nine minutes.

The boats are the sensible way to arrive if you are staying elsewhere on the lake. Como is the southern terminus of the Como to Colico line, served by both the slow battello and the faster servizio rapido on which a supplement is payable, and the piers are numbered rather than named on the operator's own timetables. What Como does not have is a car ferry: the traghetto runs only between Cadenabbia, Menaggio, Bellagio and Varenna, so a car cannot cross the lake from here. That is set out on the ferry page.

On foot from the rotunda, the lakefront runs east to Piazza Cavour in eleven minutes and on to the funicular's lower station at Piazza Alcide De Gasperi 4 in about fifteen. Going the other way it runs west past the public gardens towards Villa Olmo. There is no parking at the museum itself and the surrounding lakefront is metered; driving and parking covers the alternatives.

- Some of the instruments are copies, and that is the point. The originals gathered for the 1899 centenary exhibition burned; what stands in the cases is the survivors plus reconstructions of the losses [en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tempio_Voltiano, read in Q3 2026]. - The building is younger than the electric grid it helped make possible. Construction started in 1925 and it was inaugurated on 15 July 1928, nearly 130 years after the pile it commemorates [en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tempio_Voltiano]. - Three days a year are free to everybody, including 31 August, which is also a day the Cathedral shuts its tourist route for the patronal feast [Comune di Como, civic museums pages]. - The Abbonamento Musei Lombardia gets you in free, and it is also honoured at Villa Monastero and discounted at Villa Carlotta, which is as close to a lake-wide museum pass as this region has [Comune di Como ticket sheet; facts pack cross-check against the villas' own pages]. - The comune publishes no accessibility, dog or photography rule for the museum at all. Not a restriction, an absence: nothing is stated either way, and the number to ask is 031 574705 [Comune di Como, TICKET_Tempio-Voltiano.pdf].

Treat it as the forty minutes that make a Como half day feel complete rather than as a destination in itself. The sequence that works: the free nave route at the Cathedral at 10:30, the walk west along the lakefront, the rotunda at about 11:30, lunch in the centre, and the funicular up to the ridge in the afternoon when the light is behind you. That fills a day in Como without a single boat ticket.

If you are only passing through on the way north, the museum is the better use of a spare hour than a hurried boat, because the boat needs a timetable and this does not. Everything else on the lake that charges an entry price is indexed on things to do, the money side is on what Lake Como costs, and the whole Lake Como guide starts from the homepage.