An encyclopedic list of distinguished figures from Como appears on the façades of the former Banca Commerciale Italiana, located in the heart of the historic center between Piazza del Duomo, Piazza Grimoldi, Via Macchi, and Via Plinio. More precisely, their names are inscribed in a series of medallions running along the frieze beneath the first-floor windows. They are grouped according to historical periods, generally in sets of five, with one notable exception: Alessandro Volta, who was granted the honor of a medallion entirely dedicated to him. This distinction reflects not only the importance of his invention, the electric battery, which changed the world, but also the admiration of the building’s designer, the architect Federico Frigerio (1873–1959), who was also responsible for the Tempio Voltiano and for saving part of the scientific instruments damaged in the fire that destroyed the pavilions of the Volta celebrations of 1899. The construction of the building was completed in 1927, the centenary of the great physicist’s death. A devoted scholar of Como’s history from ancient times onward, Frigerio naturally reserved a medallion for the citizens of Como from the Roman era, in which the two Plinys “cohabit” with the poet Caecilius and two figures known through the correspondence of Pliny the Younger: his father-in-law Calpurnius Fabatus and his trusted architect Mustius. In another medallion, dedicated to figures between the Renaissance and the early modern period, Paolo Giovio appears alongside his brother Benedetto, the scholar Girolamo Borsieri, the antiquarian Fulvio Tridi, and the bibliophile Francesco Benzi, who donated the city’s first library in modern times (a library had already been established in antiquity by Pliny the Younger). The names of Como’s most illustrious citizens—here only Pliny, Giovio, and Volta—can also be read on the façade of another nearby building, the former Caffè Bottegone at Piazza Duomo 17, whose decorations and upper extension were also designed by Federico Frigerio in 1905–06.
