Monte Verità in Ascona
Monte Verità is located in the Italian-speaking Swiss Canton of Ticino. The Monte Verità complex is situated on a hill with a view of the city of Ascona and the Lago Maggiore and has long been a magnet for ideas, tendencies, experiments and historically important personalities. Monte Verità has been known as a historical meeting place since the beginning of the 20th century, as a venue for a vegetarian community and as the “Monte Verità Sanatorium” from 1900 to 1920. The Conference Centre Monte Verità offers accommodation for up to 77 persons, a hotel in the Bauhaus style, a spacious restaurant with a splendid view, a large park (70,000 m2) with a museum about the history of the “phenomenon Monte Verità”, a green tea plantation with tea house and tea ceremonies as well as a tennis court.
With the settlement of a colony of hedonists and vegetarians at the beginning of the 20th century, the mythos of Monte Verità was founded. The communal living of artists, anarchists, philosophers and thinkers attracted numerous illustrious visitors such as Hermann Hesse. After a short period at the beginning of the 1920s, in which expressionist artists ran a small art center on the hill, the German baron Eduard von der Heydt, a banker and art collector, purchased the site. He built a modern hotel on Monte Verità, which quickly became a meeting point for large personalities from art, politics and culture.
Baron von der Heydt left the property on the hill to the Canton Ticino in his will in the 1950s. At the end of the 1980s, a conference center was created at the site in collaboration with the ETH Zurich.
Hotel Complex and Conference Center Monte Verità
Strada Collina 84
6612 Ascona
Switzerland
(Text source: http://www.csf.ethz.ch/ & http://www.monteverita.org/, picture source: MM & SM & AT)
