Since 1985, Cortona Week has pursued a simple conviction: education should deepen what we know without narrowing who we become.
There is a town in Tuscany that sits on a hill between the Val di Chiana and Lake Trasimeno. Its Etruscan walls are still standing. Virgil tells us that Dardanus left this hilltop, crossed the Aegean and founded the line that built Troy and, generations later, Rome. A seed planted in a small place, grown somewhere else entirely.
Pier Luigi Luisi was Professor of Macromolecular Chemistry at ETH Zurich when he attended the 1983 Alpbach conference, Other Realities. There, he listened to physicists, biologists, monks and philosophers address common questions, bridging the way knowledge had been separated into distinct fields. He wanted to create a similar encounter for young scientists: a week that brought science into conversation with philosophy, religion, art and embodied experience. He believed that science becomes stronger when it is understood as part of a larger human enterprise. He spent the next eighteen months looking for financial support for his idea.
His path eventually crossed that of entrepreneur and philanthropist Branco Weiss, who gave Luisi twenty minutes to explain his idea: "If an idea needs more than twenty minutes to explain, it is a bad idea".
They needed less. Weiss agreed on the spot, with one condition: hold it somewhere beautiful, possibly in Tuscany.
In September 1985, two years after Luisi's eye-opening Alpbach experience, a hundred people gathered at a former monastery in Cortona, under the motto "Science and the Wholeness of Life".
Branco Weiss funded the first ten editions, asking for nothing in return. ETH Zurich hosted the programme from the beginning and assumed full financial responsibility from 1995, recognising its educational value.
The Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK) joined as co-organiser in 2008, the programme becoming the ETH’s summer school within the IDEA League, and both universities eventually recognised it in their credit systems.
The list of people who taught in Cortona Week reads like an argument for the whole idea:
David Bohm, physicist.
Francisco Varela, neuroscientist.
Lynn Margulis, evolutionary biologist.
Fritjof Capra, systems theorist.
Joan Halifax, Zen teacher and anthropologist.
Richard R. Ernst, Nobel laureate.
Roald Hoffmann, Nobel laureate.
Tania Singer, social neuroscientist.
Federico Faggin, physicist and microprocessor pioneer.
Brother David Steindl-Rast, Benedictine monk.
Lecturers and students also took part in the artistic workshops. Many participants returned in later years, as speakers, workshop leaders or members of the organising community.
Cortona Week also held editions in the United States in 2009 and Hyderabad in 2010. These remained individual editions rather than developing into separate series.
In 2017, ETH Zurich ended its cycle of financial and organisational support to the Cortona Week, despite strong feedback from participants. The programme no longer fitted the university’s priorities.
Under Pier Luigi Luisi’s leadership, alumni and organisers continued the programme independently, holding editions in Todi in 2018 and 2019. The residential week paused in 2020 due to COVID-19 pandemic restrictions, and in 2021 the Cortona Week community met virtually during online "Cortona Pearls". Residential editions resumed at the Certosa di Pontignano near Siena in 2022 and 2023, and at the Fraternità San Leonardo al Palco near Prato in 2024.
Across these years, the organisers sustained six editions without the support of a university or other host institution.
In 2026, the Cortona Week Association was founded in Switzerland to organise future editions and give the idea a stable base, at a moment when the problems it was built for have only become more entangled.
While the Cortona Week Association organises the week, ETH Alumni Cortona Week connects it to the university where it began, and to its students and alumni.
Cortona Week does not replace specialised education. It is intended for people with substantial training or experience in a field and creates a setting in which that expertise can meet other disciplines, artistic practice and reflection.
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