“This solitary house was Alessandro Volta’s favorite autumn residence,” reads a plaque placed in 1999, on the occasion of the bicentenary of the invention of the electric battery, on the wall enclosing the garden of a country villa in the Camnago Volta area. Tradition holds that it was precisely on a table in the park of this residence that the scientist perfected the first prototype of the electric battery toward the end of 1799. Within the estate there was also a private chapel dedicated to Saint Philip Neri. Next to the villa stands a courtyard building, perfectly restored, which once housed the farmers employed by the Volta family. Continuing downhill along Via Campora, the asphalt gives way to a dirt track, and one crosses a small bridge leading into a little oasis with two houses overlooking the most enchanting stretch of the Cosia stream. One of the two was originally the Volta family’s mill, and nearby was the Monteverde spring, where the young Alessandro—already extremely curious about natural phenomena—nearly drowned while searching for golden flecks pointed out to him by local farmers. In reality, as written in the memoirs of Giulio Cesare Gattoni, a former schoolmate and research companion of the great physicist, they were nothing more than ordinary mica.
