Todi-week is the prosecution of the renowned Cortona-week: a unique interdisciplinary residence where graduate students and young managers from all over the world and from a large variety of disciplines are put together with scientists, artists, musicians, spiritual leaders, poets, professionals in medicine and psychology, economists and politicians.
The location, Todi, is a beautiful, historical, hilltop city of Umbria defined as the most livable city in the world, midway between Rome and Florence and close to Perugia and Assisi.
In the next residential week, fixed for June 23-30 2018, you will hear the words of selected famous, charismatic teachers with the unitive theme “Ecology of the mind and earth”, reminiscent of Bateson’s vision of knowledge, and meet other peers from all over the world. The program is organized in lectures, round table discussions and also – unique characteristic of the event – experiential workshops where the participants can paint, do sculpture or music, meditation, theatre and so on, choosing by themselves which aspects are more important for their own life equilibrium. The magic of the event, report some of the previous years’ participants, is that it has the spirit of a retreat, where attendees, lecturers and workshop leaders spend the whole week together and discuss, without solution of continuity, in more formal as well as informal moments (meals, evenings, breaks).
As already mentioned, our legacy is the Cortona-week, an experiment initiated in the far 1985 by Professor Pier Luigi Luisi and Dr. Branco Weiss and held yearly until 2017 owing to the faithful support of the Swiss Federal Polytechnic ETHZ – Europe’s highest-rank university. To the Institute goes the honor and courage of having financially supported the 25 editions of such an unorthodox, residential summer-school, that has shaped and broadened over the years the minds of thousands of doctoral students, young researchers and managers, in the role of the leaders of our future tomorrow.
Now, the newly-grounded association CortonaFriends, gathered around Prof. Luisi, takes over to maintain the flame alive. Our wish, materializing in the next Todi-week, is to keep opening up, with the help of the world-renowned professionals and visionaries, the horizon of the participants to the values of ecology, ethics, tolerance, internal introspection as well as to the actual new frontiers of science, literature, art, economy – the full display of human experience –, so that they start regarding the world as a system of interacting parts and not as a stack of single isolated domains.