On January 26, 2000, in the midst of celebrations for the bicentennial of the invention of the battery, the Municipality of Brunate purchased what had previously been the Albergo Volta to turn it into the town’s new library and chose to “save” the reference to Volta by naming the small but scenic park surrounding the building after the great physicist. The latter was built in 1894 as Villa Scacchi, owned by Carlo Scacchi, a building contractor who had overseen the construction of the funicular railway and who had chosen a strategic location for his home, a stone’s throw from the station of the “inclined railway” that connects the city of Como with the “Balcony of the Alps” above. The conversion of the building into a municipal library, inaugurated in 2006, has in some ways morally “redeemed” the site, restoring its civic and spiritual value, following accusations made against Scacchi by newspapers at the time that she had built on top of the remains of the Augustinian monastery, where the blessed Maddalena Albrici had been abbess until 1465. All that remains of the ancient past is an eight-meter-deep well in Volta Park, where (since 2007) there has also been a bust of the Bulgarian national poet Pencho Slavejkov, who died in 1912 in a room in the Hotel Bellavista opposite. It was sculpted by artist Valentin Starcev. The “company” of illustrious figures is completed by a caricature on wood of Alda Merini, by Arnoldo Mosca Mondadori, affixed to the facade of the library facing the terrace and park, marking a stop on the Lake Como Poetry Way in memory of the poet who was very attached to the village where her grandparents lived and her father was born. Inside the library, one shelf is dedicated to Alessandro Volta and includes, among other things, the Volta magazine published for the celebrations in 1899 and a collection of themed postcards.
