Monte Verità. Back to Nature (english version)

This book collects essays on topics such as the vegetarian and sunbathing practices of the Lebensreform, the birth of theosophy and the free expressions of the human genius through the languages of dance, painting and poetry up to the study of architecture in its relation with the nature of the Hill, from the first wild settlement to the rigorous geometries of the Bauhaus years.

At the turn of the 20th century, the Ticino became the destination of visionaries and dreamers who, in search of a sanctuary for the soul, found in this region, away from the industrialised world, a fertile soil for the seeds of utopia. The founders of the colony came from northern Europe in 1900. United by a common ideal, they settled on Monescia Hill, rechristening it Monte Verità (‘The Mount of Truth’). Wearing the clothes of the «reform», they worked the fields and built huts, rejoycing through the practices of eurythmy and sunbathing. They worshiped nature, proclaiming its purity and interpreting it as the ultimate work of art.

Over the years, Monte Verità was frequented by theosophists, anarchists, psychoanalysts, writers and artists. Purchased by the banker Eduard von der Heydt in 1926, the place lived a second extraordinary cultural season, marked by the arrival of the Bauhaus masters. Today it is owned by Canton of Ticino and managed by Fondazione Monte Verità. It is a hotel, a congress center and a cultural center. The museum complex includes the air-light huts Casa Selma and Casa dei Russi, Casa Anatta, the location of the famous exhibition Monte Verità. Le mammelle della verità presented by Harald Szeemann, and the Elisarion Pavilion, with its panoramic painting The Clear World of the Blissful by Elisàr von Kupffer.