“Here in Brunate, Alessandro Volta lived as a nursling and during his childhood with Elisabetta Pedraglio, whose husband Lodovico Monti, a maker of barometers, inspired in him his first love for science, which later gave him the battery.” Thus reads a plaque affixed beside the parish church of Sant’Andrea in 1826, one year before the death of the great physicist. The text is attributed to the historian Maurizio Monti. Another inscription, placed above the entrance door of a house at number 5 on the road leading into the village and dedicated to the scientist from Como, states that “in this house Alessandro Volta spent the first years of his life.” This second plaque was installed by Pro Brunate on the 150th anniversary of the invention of the battery, that is, in 1949. However, an earlier postcard, part of a series published by the Como–Brunate Funicular Administration in 1900 and also reproduced in giant format at the Tempio Voltiano in Como, identifies as the “house where Alessandro Volta was nursed” a building at Via Monti 7, in the heart of the historic center, next to the Chapel of Our Lady of Pompeii. So, which is the correct house? According to some elderly residents of the village, the plaque was moved from Via Monti to Via Volta during renovation work on the first of the two buildings, which would therefore be the correct one. The municipal technical office, however, offers a different explanation: at the time of Volta, both houses belonged to the Pedraglio family, and as a result it later became difficult to determine in which of the two Elisabetta had actually raised the young Volta.
