Life Electric
Twin steel ribbons rising from a lake breakwater, tracing the electric tension of a battery.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to Life Electric, the steel sculpture on Como's lakeside breakwater, opens with a fight: in two thousand fourteen, architect Daniel Libeskind offered the city a monument to its most famous son, physicist Alessandro Volta, and thousands of residents signed a petition against it. It follows the dispute over the city council's refusal to hold a public vote, and then the two curling steel ribbons that rose here anyway by the following summer, roughly fourteen meters tall and lit by biodynamic LEDs at night. You'll hear how the sculpture ties into the Volta Temple and lighthouse already dedicated to him elsewhere on the lake. Come back after dark to see the mist rise off the water around it.
This audio guide was created using AI.
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Faro Voltiano
Octagonal beacon tower built as a monument to a scientist, its beam cycling white, red, and green over the lake.
Como
Lakeside birthplace of the physicist who ended a scientific feud by inventing the first battery.
Tempio Voltiano
Domed rotunda modeled on the Pantheon, preserving original instruments of the battery's inventor.