Life Electric

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.