Lake Como historical timeline

Como was the Roman Comum, and both Pliny the Elder and his nephew Pliny the Younger came from here; the younger Pliny described his lakeside villas in letters that are the earliest account of exactly the habit the shore is still known for.

Medieval Como fought a ten-year war with Milan, and in 1169 its forces destroyed Isola Comacina, the lake’s only island, which was never rebuilt. The ruins and a single eighteenth-century church are still there.

Silk arrived in the sixteenth century and became the city’s defining industry. Como still finishes a substantial share of Europe’s silk, and the trade is documented in a museum of its own.

The villa era ran from the seventeenth century into the nineteenth, when Milanese and Lombard families built summer houses and laid out gardens along the shore. The visitors followed: Shelley, Stendhal and Liszt all wrote about the lake, and Alessandro Volta — born in Como in 1745, and the reason the volt has its name — has a temple-shaped museum on the waterfront.

Lecco’s literary claim is larger than its size suggests: Manzoni set The Betrothed, the founding novel of modern Italian prose, on this arm of the lake.