The military architecture of Como, as indicated by the gates in its old city wall, was of a high order. The Porta della Torre, the chief of the gates remaining, and leading out to the Milan road, rises five stories in air.
The Palazzo Giovio is now the local museum. Paolo Giovio built the crudely ornate edifice, and began the collection of antiquities and relics which it now contains. Above Como, but outside the city, rises a curious lofty tower called the Bardello. It may have been built as one of the defences of the Lombard Kings, or it may not, but at any rate there is no doubt that it witnessed the rise and fall of the Milanese dynasties from the first. Como, one of the first cities to assert its independence, was the first to lose it. Prisoners of state were put into iron cages and stowed away in the Bardello—like animals or birds in a live stock show. They were all tagged and numbered and were fed at infrequent, uncertain hours. Not many lived out their terms; mostly they died, some of hunger, some eaten up by vermin and more than one by having dashed their brains out on the iron bars of their cages.
All about Como are little lake settlements peopled with villas and hotels where many a mediæval and modern romance has been lived in the real. It is all very delightful, but in truth all is stagey.
Cadenabbia
At Cadenabbia is the Villa Carlotta, named for Charlotte the Duchess of Saxe-Meiningen. Its structural elements build up into something imposing, if not in the best of taste, and its gardens are of the conventionally artificial kind which look as though they might be part of a stage setting.