‘The battery is the fundamental basis of all modern inventions,’ wrote Albert Einstein, returning to Lake Como in 1933, after the idyll he had experienced there in 1901 with his future wife Mileva Marić, to visit the Voltiano Temple. The Palladian-style monument, designed by architect Federico Frigerio and financed by cotton industrialist Francesco Somaini, was built in 1927 and inaugurated on 15 July 1928, during the celebrations for the centenary of Alessandro Volta’s death, which brought numerous Nobel Prize winners to Como. The only scientific celebrity of the time who was absent was the father of the “theory of relativity”, due to his opposition to fascism. But in 1933, he paid his personal tribute to the man who, in 1799, had invented the battery, the first static generator of electricity (it is no coincidence that the unit of measurement of electrical potential was named the volt).
In 1776, the physicist from Como also discovered methane gas, which he used to develop the “Volta lamp” and the “electro-pneumatic gun”, the ancestors of gas lighting and lighters. All this is commemorated in the Tempio Voltiano, where the scientist’s scientific instruments are on display on the ground floor; some of these are copies, as the originals were destroyed in a fire that devastated the pavilions of the 1899 celebrations. In the loggia on the first floor, panels and paintings present Volta’s biography intertwined with the history of the city where he held important public offices. Four high-relief stucco panels by Pietro Clerici depicting “Episodes from Volta’s Life” are affixed to the parapet of the loggia, alternating with sixteen tondos bearing the most significant dates in gold lettering. Visitors are welcomed on either side of the entrance by two statues representing Science and Faith, the work of Carlo and Luigi Rigola.
