Como Cathedral has a frog on its side door, and the panel around it has gone black. That’s luck: tradition says to rub the frog before you go in.

The building took its time. Work ran from 1396 to 1744, so the facade is Gothic, the apses are Renaissance and the dome, by Filippo Juvarra, is baroque.

Tommaso Rodari, nicknamed the “Michelangelo of Lake Como,” left the seated statues beside the main portal. They show Pliny the Elder and Pliny the Younger, who legend says were both from the lake.

VoiceMap’s tours use the cathedral to show how Como’s marble came through its trade with nearby Switzerland. They also trace the *Maestri Comacini*, the medieval stonemasons and sculptors who worked on it and on many of the city’s other buildings.