Porta Torre Como and the Medieval City Walls

The Milan Side: A Wall With No Answer

Stand in Piazza Vittoria, on the traffic side outside the walls, and you see the face the builders turned toward Milan. The outer facade is massive and almost blind, an impenetrable screen of masonry with no decoration and no weakness to exploit. italia.it calls it an impenetrable facade, and that is the whole point. The tower faces Milan, the city that pulled down Como's Roman walls at the end of the Ten Years' War.

Because Piazza Vittoria is a working traffic junction, do not linger at the kerb. The better photograph and the better look come from the city side, through the big arch.

The City Side: Four Orders of Arches

Walk through the gate and turn around. The inner face is lightened by four orders of paired arches, one above the other, matching the four internal floors of the tower. Those floors were wooden and they are destroyed, so what you see now is the masonry skeleton, eight arches set off-axis to the much larger ground-floor arch below them.

The ring of squared blocks around that big ground arch alternates white and black stone. Como Cathedral and the Broletto stand inside the walls to the north.

The Bell Window

High on the inner face there is a round-arched window. italia.it records that it once let people see the bell used to warn citizens of danger. It is worth finding in your photograph, because it explains what the tower was for beyond defence. Porta Torre was also the city's alarm.

What Is Missing

The four wooden floors are gone, and with them any possibility of walking up. The catalogue of Lombardia Beni Culturali lists the current use simply as a monument, owned by a public body. So the tower you photograph is the load-bearing frame of a building whose insides have been emptied by time.

That is also why no operator sells entry, and why every price table for Porta Torre starts and ends at zero.

The Only Complete Side

Everywhere else the circuit is broken, buried or half-demolished. On the south side the wall still runs unbroken from corner tower to corner tower, and it still shows its scarpa, the sloped masonry base that, at regular intervals, strengthened the foot of the wall. Start at the south-west corner and walk the line.

Torre Gattoni and Volta's Laboratory

The Torre Nuova at the south-west corner is pentagonal, like the two small towers that once flanked Porta Torre. It is better known as Torre Gattoni, after Giulio Cesare Gattoni, a canon and its 19th-century owner who had a physics laboratory there. Alessandro Volta studied the electric pile in that laboratory.

A defensive tower that ended up hosting the experiments of Italy's most famous physicist is a good place to start thinking about how these walls were reused once their military job was done.

Porta Torre in the Middle

Halfway along the side, Porta Torre opens the wall with its great arch. This is the position to photograph it from, with the scarpa below and the complete curtain wall running away on both sides. Remember to go through to the city side for the four orders of arches.

Torre San Vitale and the Museum

At the opposite corner stands Torre di San Vitale, about 36 metres high by the catalogue's circa figure, next to the Museo archeologico Paolo Giovio. A note for planning: the museum's exhibition halls are currently closed to the public for maintenance work and the Comune page gives no reopening date, so treat the tower as an exterior sight. Local news reported a new lighting installation on the wall stretch between Torre Gattoni and Torre San Vitale, so this side is worth a second look after dark.

The West Side: Gates and Traces

On the west side stood Porta Sala, at today's junction of Via Garibaldi and Piazza Cacciatori delle Alpi, and then the gates of Santa Margherita and dell'Annunciata. Of those two only traces of the defensive forebuildings remain. You are reading street archaeology here, not standing monuments, so set expectations accordingly.

The East Side: Partial Survival

The east side survives only in part, with remains of late-communal fortifications and of the Castello della Torre Rotonda, the castle built across the side in 1284-1285 and demolished in the 19th century. This is the side the lake extension once ran from.

Castel Baradello

Castel Baradello belongs to the same listed complex as the walls, but it stands on the hill outside the centre, not on the circuit. Plan it as its own outing rather than part of a wall walk.

The Roman Line and the Porta Pretoria

The medieval walls follow the Roman line on a slightly wider perimeter, so the older city is underneath you as you walk. The Roman Porta Pretoria, two arches flanked by two towers of the colony founded under Caesar, survives in a semi-basement archaeological site and was reopened after restoration according to local reporting. No official opening hours for visiting it are published, so check on site or ask at the Broletto infopoint before building it into your route.

No. The tower is not visitable inside, and no Comune page publishes opening hours or a ticket for it, because there is nothing to open. The reason is structural: the four internal floors were wooden and they are destroyed, so there is no staircase, no landings and nothing to walk on. The catalogue lists its current use simply as a monument. Museionline carries the same verdict, a tower not visitable inside.

If you want to climb something, the hill will not help: the Faro Voltiano lighthouse above Brunate has been closed since 2024 with no reopening date, and it is only seen from outside. In the centre, the $6.92 (€6) ticket at Como Cathedral opens the transept and the choir, and the upper walkways are only open with a signed form and a licensed guide.

If you read the regional heritage catalogue closely you will find two different dates for Porta Torre in two of its own records. The short record for the tower prints a 14th-century construction date. The fuller complex record of the walls, the one that walks through the whole building sequence, states that the great Porta Torre was completed by 1192, in the phase of the Barbarossa rebuilding. italia.it uses the same 12th-century completion and even puts it in a sentence, withstanding the passage of time since 1192.

So the catalogue itself is inconsistent, and the balance of the fuller record and the national portal points clearly to the 12th century. We print 1192 as the completion date throughout this page and do not use the 14th century for Porta Torre itself. The 14th century does belong to the walls' story, but for a different feature: it is when the two much smaller pentagonal towers were added to flank the gate. If you see a 14th-century date attached to Porta Torre somewhere in print, that is the short record's figure, not the considered one.

Porta Torre works either as the first stop or the last of an old-town loop, because the gate is the front door of the walled city. Start here, come through the arch and walk inward to Como Cathedral and the Broletto, and you read the city the way it was meant to be read, from the wall to the heart. Or walk the centre first and finish at the gate in the evening, when the stretch between Torre Gattoni and San Vitale is lit.

Our one day in Como itinerary places the walls in exactly this way, and the Como old town guide covers the streets and squares inside. Since the whole walled city is a limited traffic zone enforced by cameras all year, arrive on foot, by bus or by train and keep the walk car-free.