Monte Verità Foundation and Cultural Center

Monte Verità Foundation and Cultural Center stands on the hills overlooking Ascona and Lake Maggiore, Switzerland, and has always been a magnet for ideas, trends, experiments and historical figures.

At the turn of the 20th century, an alternative, vegetarian colony was founded on the site, and the mythical golden age of Monte Verità began. Artists, anarchists, philosophers and thinkers settled there, with illustrious guests such as Hermann Hesse among them. After a brief period in the early 1920s, during which a group of expressionist artists set up a small artistic community, the hill just in Ascona was purchased by the German banker and art collector Baron Eduard von der Heydt. It was then that Monte Verità became a modern hotel complex, visited by high-profile figures from the worlds of art, politics and culture. The Baron bequeathed Monte Verità to the Canton Ticino in the 1950s, and in the late 1980s it was turned into a conference centre thanks to a partnership with the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich.

The annual cultural programme is underpinned by partnerships with organisations and institutions which have benefitted from the positive energy of Monte Verità's "genius loci" in different ways and in different periods.