Vallico Sotto · Apuan Alps · Tuscany

Vallico Academy

An experiment in thought, community and the renewal of a Tuscan mountain village.

The experiment

Somewhere to think.

A village with around 25 inhabitants. A thousand years of history. A new experiment in how people might live and think together.

Can intellectual life, agriculture and social inclusion occupy the same place rather than separate institutions? Can people come somewhere not simply to visit, but to contribute? Can a village that has lost almost all its population become useful again?
The former church at Vallico Academy prepared for a lecture
01 · The Academy

A place to think.

Residencies, lectures, conversations, books, arguments and time.

 Stone farmhouse above Vallico Sotto
02 · The Farm

A place to work.

Terraces, woodland, alpacas and an inclusive working community.

 Vallico Sotto in the Apuan Alps
03 · The Village

A place to belong.

Stone, mountain paths, old stories and a village still alive.
THINK · WALK · WORK · GROW
Red door of the former Oratorio del Santo Crocifisso

Continuity

From the Towler Institute to Vallico Academy.

For two decades this site brought scientists and students from around the world to a tiny mountain village. The Academy keeps that history, but opens the doors wider: to other disciplines, other kinds of thinking, the land itself, and the people who work on it.

Explore the story and archive

Series I · 2026

The Vallico Academy Lecture Series

Five lectures by Mike Towler on apparently unrelated subjects. One question running underneath all of them. The inaugural Academy series moved from a Victorian explorer through ancient philosophy and quantum foundations to consciousness, neuroscience and two ways of paying attention.

Lecture One: Richard Francis Burton
Lecture One

Richard Francis Burton

Explorer. Linguist. Scandal.

Lecture Two: Plotinus and Western Esotericism
Lecture Two

Plotinus & Western Esotericism

Mystics. Heretics. Engineers.

Lecture Three: De Broglie, Bohm, and the Pilot Wave
Lecture Three

De Broglie, Bohm, and the Pilot Wave

Waves. Particles. Exile.

Lecture Four: Local Brains, Universal Consciousness
Lecture Four

Local Brains, Universal Consciousness

Orchestrated Objective Reduction vs. the de Broglie-Bohm Panpsychist Cosmos

Lecture Five: Narrow Beam and Open Field
Lecture Five

Narrow Beam and Open Field

The Blindness that Cannot Detect Itself

The place

Not a retreat from the world.
A particular piece of it.

Vallico Sotto sits on a rocky spur in the Apuan Alps, among chestnut woods, old terraces and paths that once carried wine, charcoal and chestnuts between mountain villages.

Explore Vallico Sotto
Vallico Sotto seen across the valley
Vallico Sotto · Tuscany
Bell and cross above the former Oratorio
Farmhouse above Vallico

A thousand years of Vallico

The next chapter is not the first.

The documented story begins with Valivo in 997 and runs through fortified villages, wars, terraces, churches, depopulation, the Towler Institute and the Academy.

Explore history, maps and investigations

997 Valivo appears in the documentary record.

1500s A fortified mountain community amid the struggles of Garfagnana.

2005 The Towler Institute opens; its physics programme later becomes known as the Apuan Alps Centre for Physics.

2026 The first Vallico Academy guests and inaugural Lecture Series.

Next Academy, Farm, terraces, forest and a village experiment.

Visit

Come up the mountain.

The Academy is in Vallico Sotto, in the Apuan Alps north of Lucca. Residency, event and visiting information will appear here as the programme develops.

Visit Vallico