HOME » POPULAR ITALIAN DESTINATIONS » COMO TRAVEL GUIDE » COMO HISTORY GUIDE
About this guide: This guide to the history of Como was written by the Italian-born travel specialists at Trips 2 Italy, a custom tour operator that has designed hand-crafted Italian vacations since 2003. Every recommendation below reflects the same first-hand knowledge our team draws on when we build a private Como itinerary around a traveler’s interests, dates, and pace. Read it for your research, then let us translate it into a trip designed entirely around you.
Celtic tribes settled the hills around the lake’s foot centuries before Rome arrived, but the city itself is a Roman act of will. In 59 BC Julius Caesar refounded the settlement on the drained marshy ground at the water’s edge as Novum Comum, planting five thousand colonists behind a rectangular circuit of walls. That Roman grid is still the street plan of the walled center today, one of the clearest examples in Lombardy of a living city wearing its ancient bones.
Roman Como prospered as the port where the roads from Milan met the water route toward the Alpine passes, and it gave the empire two of its most famous writers. Pliny the Elder, author of the monumental Natural History, was born here in 23 AD and died observing the eruption of Vesuvius; his nephew Pliny the Younger, whose letters preserve that catastrophe for history, endowed his hometown with baths, a library, and charitable foundations he describes with evident pride.
The city has never forgotten them. Renaissance sculptors set both Plinys in niches beside the cathedral’s main door, a startling honor for pagan authors on a Christian facade, and their names surface across the lake on villas and hotels to this day. Walking the grid with a historian who can point out the Roman gates beneath the medieval stones, and the baths excavated beneath a modern street, makes the city’s twenty-one centuries feel continuous rather than buried.
Medieval Como grew rich on trade and paid for it in rivalry. As the natural gateway between the Po plain and the passes to the north, the city competed directly with Milan, and the contest exploded in the Ten Years’ War of 1118 to 1127, a grinding struggle between the two communes that ended with Milanese troops demolishing Como’s walls and much of the town. It is the great trauma of the city’s story, and the pivot of everything that followed.
Revenge arrived with an emperor. When Frederick Barbarossa descended into Italy to humble Milan, Como allied with him eagerly, and the grateful emperor rebuilt the city’s defenses in the 1150s. The Castello Baradello, the tower still standing guard on its hill above the city, rose as part of his fortifications, and the circuit of walls that defines the historic center today, with the massive gate tower of Porta Torre completed in 1192, is the medieval city’s answer to its destruction.
Within the rebuilt walls, Romanesque Como flowered. The basilica of Sant’Abbondio, consecrated by Pope Urban II in 1095 and famous for its twin bell towers and later fresco cycle, remains one of Lombardy’s purest Romanesque churches, and San Fedele anchored the market square at the grid’s heart. The master builders of this region, the magistri comacini, carried the Lombard Romanesque style across Europe, an export as influential in its day as silk would become.
From the fourteenth century Como’s fate was tied to Milan’s, first under the Visconti dukes and then the Sforza, trading independence for stability within one of Europe’s most brilliant courts. The city channeled its ambition into stone: in 1396 it began the cathedral, an undertaking so sustained that construction outlived the Gothic style it started in, absorbed the Renaissance through the carved portals of the Rodari brothers, and finished only in the eighteenth century beneath Juvarra’s dome.
After the Sforza fell, Como passed with the duchy of Milan to Spanish rule in 1535, and two hard centuries followed, marked by heavy taxation, plague, and the slow reorientation of trade. Yet the seeds of the city’s modern fortune were already planted: mulberry trees had spread across the surrounding hills in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and silkworm raising and weaving grew steadily into the city’s defining industry.
Austrian rule from 1714 brought enlightened administration and revival. The Habsburg decades modernized the silk trade, and Como’s manufacturers built the reputation for design and finishing that still distinguishes them. It was in this hopeful climate that the city produced its most celebrated son, Alessandro Volta, born in 1745, whose experiments would shortly give the world an entirely new kind of power.
The nineteenth century turned a craft into an identity. Steam power, Jacquard looms, and the opening of rail links let Como’s spinning and weaving mills multiply along the valleys, and the city became the silk capital of Europe, supplying fabric to every court and fashion house on the continent. In 1868 it founded the Setificio, the technical silk school that professionalized the industry and still trains its designers and technicians more than a century and a half later.
Silk shaped the city’s society as much as its economy. Dynasties of manufacturers built the villas along the lakefront, endowed institutions, and pushed innovations in dyeing and printing that kept Como ahead of its rivals across Europe, a strategy the city still follows: when raw silk production migrated to Asia in the twentieth century, Como kept the high arts of design, printing, and finishing, and the world’s luxury houses kept coming to Como for them. The workforce followed the same path, moving from loom sheds to design studios and laboratories, so the industry rose in refinement even as it shrank in size.
That continuity makes the city’s industrial history unusually visitable. The Museo della Seta preserves the looms, printing tables, and pattern books of the great age, working ateliers still print for names every traveler knows, and the silk school’s story threads through it all. We arrange visits that connect the museum to the living workshops, so the history arrives not as nostalgia but as a craft still earning its keep.
In 1800 a Como physics professor stacked discs of copper and zinc between brine-soaked cloth and produced the first steady electrical current in history. Alessandro Volta’s pile made him the most celebrated scientist in Europe, summoned to demonstrate the invention before Napoleon, and it made his hometown a place of pilgrimage for the age of electricity. When the world’s electrical units were standardized, the volt fixed Como’s name in every language on earth.
The Risorgimento brought the city into modern Italy through one of its liveliest episodes: in May 1859 Giuseppe Garibaldi and his volunteer Hunters of the Alps defeated the Austrians at San Fermo on the hills above town and entered Como to a delirious welcome. Unification opened the city’s greatest boom, and the centenary of Volta’s death in 1927 crowned it with the Tempio Voltiano on the lakefront and the lighthouse above Brunate, twin monuments of civic gratitude.
The interwar years added the most surprising chapter. A circle of young Como architects led by Giuseppe Terragni made the city the proving ground of Italian rationalism, raising buildings of glass, marble, and pure proportion beside the medieval walls, and the lakefront war memorial rose from drawings by Antonio Sant’Elia, the Como futurist killed in the First World War. A city already twenty centuries old calmly added the architecture of the twentieth to its collection.
Start inside the grid Caesar drew. Porta Torre still guards the southern entrance to the walled city as it has since 1192, the Broletto’s striped marble records the medieval commune, and the Duomo beside it compresses four centuries of ambition into a single facade, with the two Plinys watching from their niches. Ten minutes away, Sant’Abbondio keeps the Romanesque age intact, its twin towers and frescoed apse little changed in nine hundred years.
The modern centuries have their own itinerary. The Museo della Seta preserves the machinery and patterns of the silk age, the Tempio Voltiano displays Volta’s instruments where the lakefront gardens meet the water, and the Casa del Fascio stands behind the cathedral as rationalism’s most studied monument. Climb to the Castello Baradello or ride the funicular, running since 1894, up to Brunate, and the whole story lies below you in one glance: Roman grid, medieval walls, silk-built villas, and the modern city around them.
Sequence is what turns these sites into a narrative, and it is our specialty. We compose history-focused days that move chronologically from the Roman gates to the rationalist lakefront, paired with guides chosen for their storytelling as much as their scholarship, so twenty-one centuries arrive as one continuous, comprehensible tale.
Como treats preservation as a working habit rather than a museum policy. The walled center is protected as a whole, archaeological windows keep the Roman baths and gates visible beneath the modern city, and the medieval churches remain consecrated, maintained, and in daily use. Even the rationalist buildings, once politically awkward, are now conserved and studied as landmarks of twentieth-century design, with the Casa del Fascio at the center of ongoing scholarly attention.
The living crafts receive the same care. The silk school founded in 1868 still trains each generation of designers and technicians, the pattern archives of the great printing houses are conserved as cultural patrimony, and the Museo della Seta grows through donations from the industry itself. When Como celebrates Volta with festivals of light or science, or revives Barbarossa’s age at the Palio del Baradello, it is a city maintaining its memory in public, for its own pleasure first.
For travelers, this means Como’s past is unusually intact and unusually welcoming. We arrange encounters with that preservation world where access allows, from silk archives to restoration specialists, as part of our cultural tours across Italy. History in Como is a working enterprise, and meeting its custodians is one of the city’s quiet privileges.
Como deserves more than a template. Since 2003, Trips 2 Italy has designed private Italian vacations one traveler at a time, hand selecting every experience based on what you tell us rather than fitting you into a predefined package. Our Italian-born team plans Como with the knowledge of people who call Italy home, from the silk ateliers of the walled city to the funicular terrace at Brunate and the blue water at the city’s doorstep, and we remain at your side throughout your trip with 24/7 assistance. Tell us how you imagine Como, and we will craft the itinerary that matches it.
From the peaks of the Dolomites to the shores of the Italian Riviera, an escorted 16-day journey through Northern Italy: Cortina, Venice, Verona, Lakes Garda, Como and Maggiore, Milan,
Set out on an unforgettable 11-day summer family adventure across Northern Italy, perfectly crafted for travelers of all ages. Begin with Milan’s iconic landmarks and vibrant atmosphere, then unwind
A romantic 12-day journey through southern Italy featuring charming towns, candlelit piazzas, ancient wonders, and breezy seaside escapes from Lecce to Bari, with experiences designed for unforgettable moments together. Starting from $7,844 per person
Julius Caesar refounded the settlement as Novum Comum in 59 BC, planting five thousand colonists on a drained site at the lake’s foot behind rectangular walls. The Roman street grid still organizes the walled center today, and traces of the ancient gates and baths remain visible beneath the modern city.
Pliny the Elder, born in Como in 23 AD, wrote the encyclopedic Natural History and died in the eruption of Vesuvius; his nephew Pliny the Younger, also Como-born, described that eruption in letters that remain eyewitness history. Renaissance Como honored both with statues beside the cathedral’s main door, where they still preside.
Milan destroyed the city in the Ten Years’ War of 1118 to 1127, and Como rebuilt its defenses with the help of Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, its ally against Milan. The surviving circuit, the Castello Baradello above the city, and the great gate tower of Porta Torre, completed in 1192, all date from that reconstruction.
Nearly four centuries, from its beginning in 1396 to the completion of Filippo Juvarra’s dome in the 1740s. The long construction is precisely its fascination: the facade and portals record the passage from Gothic to Renaissance taste, with the carved doors of the local Rodari brothers marking the transition. Trips 2 Italy pairs the visit with art historians who make that four-century story legible stone by stone.
Volta, born in Como in 1745, invented the voltaic pile in 1800, the first battery and the first source of steady electrical current, demonstrating it before Napoleon soon after. The volt is named for him, and Como honors him with the lakefront Tempio Voltiano, the Brunate lighthouse, and the Life Electric sculpture.
Yes, and it is the best way to make twenty-one centuries legible. Trips 2 Italy pairs travelers with historians and art specialists who walk the Roman grid, the medieval churches, the silk museum, and the rationalist landmarks in narrative sequence, with visits timed for the quietest hours of each site.
