Torno

This guide to the intermittent spring in Torno, on Lake Como, sets two of history's sharpest observers against each other: Pliny the Younger, who counted three surges a day, and Leonardo da Vinci, sent here on official business for the Duke of Milan roughly thirteen hundred years later, who counted four. It follows the water dropping some eighty meters down the cliff into the lake, and the sixteenth-century governor Giovanni Anguissola, who built a villa right against the cliff specifically to seat dinner guests inside the flood. Napoleon reportedly slept here and Rossini claimed to have composed under its roof, yet neither they nor Leonardo ever explained why the spring keeps its rhythm.