Monte Verità
Situated on Lake Maggiore, Monte Verità was a well-known meeting place for life-reformers (Lebensreformer), pacifists, artists, writers, and supporters of various alternative movements in the first decades of the 20th century.
A whole series of foreign intellectuals who had their temporary or permanent residence around Lake Maggiore in the 19th century belonged to the prehistory of the Monte Verità settlement project.
Around 1889, the politician and theosophist Alfredo Pioda [de], together with Franz Hartmann and Countess Constance Wachtmeister, developed a plan to build a theosophical monastery called "Fraternitas" on Monte Monescia.
In November 1900, Engelmann met the Gräser brothers and probably drew their attention to the property on Monte Monescia that had already been purchased by Alfredo Pioda [de].
The aspiring painter Ernst Gräser [de] later also lived temporarily on "Monte Verità" and lured fellow students such as Willi Baumeister, Oskar Schlemmer, and Johannes Itten to the closely related colony in Amden on Walensee.
It was also decided that the cooperative should be founded on the shore of one of the northern Italian lakes and that, in order to find the right place, they wanted to set off immediately – on foot.
They founded their "vegetable cooperative," a settlement community initially on a vegan and later vegetarian basis, and in 1902 they gave it the name Sanatorium Monte Verità.
Ida Hofmann later wrote in the new orthography developed mainly by Henri Oedenkoven: The meaning of the name of the establishment which we have chosen [is so] to explain, that we in no way claim to have found the 'truth', to monopolize, but that we, contrary to the often lying behaviour of the business world and striving for it from the conventional prejudices of society, in word and deed "was" to help the lie to be destroyed, the truth to be successful.In order to finance the settlement project and at the same time make it known to a larger public, Oedenkoven and his partner Hofmann established the "Nature Healing Sanctuary Sun Sanatorium" (in German: Naturheilstätte Sonnen-Kuranstalt), which was shortly afterwards renamed "Sanatorium Monte Verità".
One of the early guests of this institution was the barefoot itinerant preacher Gustaf Nagel [de], who took a short break on Monte Verità in November 1902 on his missionary journey from Arendsee to Jerusalem.
Artists and other famous people attracted to this hill included Hermann Hesse,[4] Carl Jung, Erich Maria Remarque, Hugo Ball, Else Lasker-Schüler, Stefan George, Isadora Duncan, Carl Eugen Keel, Paul Klee, Carlo Mense, Arnold Ehret, Rudolf Steiner, Mary Wigman (at that time still Wiegmann), Max Picard, Ernst Toller, Henry van de Velde, Fanny zu Reventlow, Rudolf von Laban, Frieda and Else von Richthofen, Otto Gross, Erich Mühsam, Walter Segal, Max Weber,[5]: 269–70 Gustav Stresemann,[6] and Gustav Nagel.
It was used by the Ticino peasants to designate the heterogeneous community of utopians, vegetarians, naturists, and theosophists who settled on the slopes of Mount Monescia (renamed Monte Verità).
This community, inspired by the theories of Bakunin and Mühsam (famous anarchists), Oedenkoven, Hofmann, and the Gräser's (utopian socialists), Hartmann and Pioda (vegetarian theosophists and humanists), and von Laban (theorist of the "reform of life"), was mainly financed by the Northern European nobility.
[7] The colonists "abhorred private property, practiced a rigid code of morality, strict vegetarianism, and introduced health aspects of the German Freikörperkultur movement (FKK, free body culture, also known as naturism).
[9][10] In 1917, the occultist Theodor Reuss, and master of Ordo Templi Orientis, staged a conference on Monte Verità covering many themes, including societies without nationalism, women's rights, mystic freemasonry, and dance as art, ritual, and religion.
