Alessandro Volta

Alessandro Volta brings you into Como, the Italian city where he was born in 1745. Here, the story of electricity begins with a scientist shaped by the Enlightenment and local life.

At eighteen, he exchanged letters with European physicists including Nollet and Beccaria. His travels through Switzerland, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, France, England and Austria expanded that scientific network. As a professor at the University of Pavia, he studied gases and meteorology while building laboratory equipment himself. In 1775, he invented the electrophorus, an electrostatic generator that produced a continuous electric charge. In 1800, copper and zinc discs separated by saltwater-soaked cardboard formed his voltaic pile, the first chemical battery. That steady current helped establish electricity as something people could generate and control.

Volta also identified methane in 1776, describing it as flammable air in marshes. He presented the voltaic pile to Napoleon Bonaparte in Paris in 1800, when he was fifty-five. Como preserves this connection through the Tempio Voltiano, a museum dedicated to his life and work. His legacy reaches even into everyday language, because the volt measures electric potential.