The Vallico Academy (formerly the Apuan Alps Centre for Physics)

Residential academy. Electronic-structure laboratory. Social farm. Cinema.
Vallico Sotto, Tuscany, Italy

Main Vallico Portal |
The Vallico Academy |
Academy Lectures |
Historical Archive: Apuan Alps Centre for Physics (2004-2017)

The Building: From Il Collegio to the Apuan Alps Centre for Physics

The building at via del Collegio 22 has had many names. Its official ecclesiastical title was the Oratorio del Santissimo Crocifisso (Oratory of the Most Holy Crucifix), though nobody ever calls it that. For hundreds of years the locals knew it simply as ‘Il Collegio’ (The College). Across the centuries it functioned as a monastery, a school, a hospital, and a pilgrimage way station. Two thousand years ago, local tradition holds, Hannibal and the Carthaginians marched down the mule trail right past the front door with their elephants and mercenaries on their way to inflict hell and death at Cannae. In more recent times, as young people left Vallico Sotto after the Second World War and the village population fell from around 800 in the 1920s to roughly 25 today, the church was deconsecrated and abandoned, becoming known as ‘Giacomo’s house’ after the old man who lived there.

In 2004 the building was bought and restored by Cambridge physicist Mike Towler and his wife, the bronze sculptor Samantha Keil (founder of Keil Space in Florence). Informally dubbed the ‘Towler Institute’ (TTI) as a joke, the monastery played host over the next twelve years to a series of subsidiary incarnations, most famously the Apuan Alps Centre for Physics (historical web archive here).

Between 2005 and 2017, the Apuan Alps Centre for Physics served as the principal international gathering place for the quantum Monte Carlo community. Across twenty-three major residential events, it hosted ten years of the international “QMC in the Apuan Alps” summer conferences alongside ten editions of the week-long “Quantum Monte Carlo and the CASINO program” summer schools (2006 to 2016, plus an eleventh school for a delegation from Japan in 2017), where generations of QMC students and postdocs were trained through twenty-plus hours of lectures and hands-on tuition by the main CASINO authors. The Centre also welcomed opera singers, workshops on nucleic acids, the KKR computational method, and density-functional theory code development, as well as the legendary August 2010 conference “21st-Century Directions in de Broglie-Bohm Theory and Beyond” co-organised with Antony Valentini and attended by Basil Hiley (which memorably resulted in Mike being threatened by psychics and receiving an email from a Guardian journalist that began: “Dear Mike. I was having a very nice afternoon sitting in the directors’ box at Nottingham Forest with [UK Justice Secretary] Kenneth Clarke when Uri Geller called, and I thought it was such a funny combination of circumstances…”).

The Reopening: The Vallico Academy and Vallico Farm

What was originally a long-term dream during the old summer-school years (expanding into neighbouring buildings in the village, installing year-round heating, and turning the site into a permanent residential sanctuary where scholars could live, think, and help bring the surrounding mountain terraces back into agricultural life) is now a reality.

In August 2026, following an eight-year hiatus and extensive refurbishment, the site reopened with a broader and more enduring purpose as The Vallico Academy (https://vallico.net). The Academy is now the permanent institutional home of the CASINO project, housing a dedicated computational electronic-structure laboratory (a fleet of 64-core workstations in Vallico Sotto and Florence) alongside its historic library and lecture theatre in the former church.

Inspired by Plato’s original Akademeia and Marsilio Ficino’s Florentine Academy, the Vallico Academy and its sister initiative, Vallico Farm, combine three things on a single site:

• Unhurried Scholarly Residencies and Lectures: A residential sanctuary where physicists, philosophers, historians, writers, and artists can step away from the bureaucracy and metric-chasing of modern university life to pursue long, difficult questions across disciplines. Arguments begun in the lecture hall continue over dinner and along mountain paths. The Academy’s inaugural five-lecture series (August 2026), exploring the relationship between physics, consciousness, history, and the divided brain, is published in full with slides and speaker scripts at https://vallico.net/academy/lectures/.
• Computational Physics and QMC: The Academy continues to host small, focused workshops and collaborative research visits around quantum Monte Carlo, pilot-wave dynamics, and the ongoing development of CASINO.
• Vallico Farm (Agricoltura Sociale): Set on 8,300 m² of restored south-facing agricultural terraces above the village, with a planned forest trail to the nearby waterfall, Vallico Farm is an inclusive social-farming enterprise built around alpaca rearing, simple crops, and woodland maintenance. Designed from the outset so that adults with learning difficulties (including Mike’s son Jamie) live and work as full participants alongside visiting scholars, the Farm aims to breathe permanent working life back into a remarkable Tuscan mountain village.

Proposals for small residential workshops, scholarly visits, or collaborations with the Academy and Farm are always welcome; please contact Mike Towler ([email protected]) or visit https://vallico.net for further details. Full records, photographs, and lecture slides from the 2004-2017 Towler Institute and Apuan Alps Centre for Physics era remain permanently available in the TTI historical archive.