Alessandro Volta was also closely associated with another place of exceptional natural interest on the outskirts of Como: the Oasi del Bassone. More precisely, one of the six houses belonging to his family stood in this area. To locate it, use the Trattoria Bassone at Via Ninguarda 40 as a reference point, on the border between the municipality of Como, in the Albate district, and Senna Comasco. A few dozen meters away, along Via per Albate, you will see a rural building that is currently in a state of abandonment and resembles a farmhouse, with a severely deteriorated animal shed: this is Cascina Bassone, or Cascina Volta as some call it. In an 1875 book, Alessandro Volta’s great-grandnephew, the lawyer Zanino, recalled that a seventeenth-century ancestor of the same name had purchased, among other properties, “the estates of Trecallo and Bassone with a residence.” In the guide Lake Como Is Green, published in 2016 by the Chamber of Commerce, it is stated that “as a young boy, Volta spent his holidays here carrying out his first scientific observations on marsh gases and frogs.” From the farmhouse, visitors are advised to take a dirt road that becomes a path and leads into the marshy woodland, where they first encounter the small pond and then the large pond, both equipped with observation points created by the Como Raiders. Following the edge of the woods to the boundary of the Oasi del Bassone, near the prison of the same name, one reaches the trackbed of the Como–Milan railway, which also bears Volta’s imprint: it was conceived by the scientist’s son, Zanino, who in order to obtain the concession in 1836 squandered the family fortune and eventually had to transfer it to another company, which completed the line in 1849. On the way back, across the wide meadows that characterize the area, one stops at Cascina Bengasi, which preserves a treasure of farming tools, bird nests, and peat samples—the organic fuel extracted from the nineteenth century until the mid-twentieth century, in whose quarries the ponds were formed.
