Think
Work on something difficult without having to package every hour into a meeting, metric or deliverable.
The idea
Time, place and attention.
Vallico Academy is for scientists, scholars, writers, artists and other curious people who want to get away from the machinery of ordinary professional life for a while — not to stop working, but to work differently.
There are books, talks and places to sit. There are mountains outside the door. There are other people to argue with over dinner. There is a village around the building and, increasingly, a working farm above it.
The point is not isolation. It is attention.
Walk
The old paths, terraces and mountains are not decoration around the Academy. Moving through them is part of the intellectual environment.
Talk
Ideas are expected to escape their disciplines. Conversation over dinner or on a path may matter as much as anything said from the front of a room.
Argue
Unfashionable questions are welcome. So are objections. Speculation is allowed; pretending speculation is established fact is not.
“
Somewhere people come to think and walk and argue in the oldest sense of the word, with a working farm attached.
From the closing lecture of the inaugural Vallico Academy series · 2026
The room
A church, a lecture room, a library, a place to argue.
The principal gathering space is part of the former Oratorio del Santo Crocifisso — the old building known locally as the Collegio. Today the room contains books, instruments, pictures, scientific objects and the equipment for talks and films.
It is not intended to resemble a university lecture theatre. That is rather the point.
Library & reading
Books that are meant to be used.
The Academy library is growing around the subjects actually discussed here: physics, philosophy, consciousness, history, literature, art and whatever the next visitor happens to bring into the conversation.
It is deliberately not a decorative wall of matching spines. A broken-backed book full of marginal notes is doing its job.
Books & conversation
Not every conversation needs a lectern.
The living room in the main building is intended for the less formal half of Academy life: reading, tea, late-evening arguments and conversations that continue after a lecture has technically ended. Five original oil paintings share the walls with a deliberately eclectic collection of books.
One bookcase contains the Classical Education Library. It began with a four-year syllabus from Thomas Aquinas College — a Great Books curriculum in which Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Dante and Shakespeare sit alongside Euclid, Galileo, Newton, Darwin and Einstein. The list was too good to leave as a list, so we began buying it. Most of the books are now here.
The point is not to reproduce another college's theology or curriculum. It is to keep within reach a serious map of an older idea of education: philosophy, literature, theology, science, mathematics and history in conversation with one another.
Body & mind
The body has not been forgotten.
Like its distant Athenian ancestor, Vallico Academy has room for the body as well as the mind. Alongside the library, lecture room and mountain paths are places to train, recover and occasionally hit things.
The indoor rooms include a KLAFS sauna, a Technogym Excite+ Synchro elliptical trainer and a Technogym Unica weights station. Outside, under stone and timber, the equipment becomes rougher: free weights, a suspension trainer, punch bags and a wooden dummy for Wing Chun.
None of this is intended to turn the Academy into a wellness retreat. It is simply part of the proposition that people think better when the rest of the organism is allowed to participate.
Thinking, walking, lifting, sweating, arguing, eating, sleeping. It is all one animal.
The Academy in action
The inaugural Lecture Series
The first Academy guests arrived in 2026. Over five evenings Mike Towler gave five apparently unrelated lectures, with one concealed question running underneath all of them.
Explore Lecture Series I
I
Richard Francis Burton
Explorer. Linguist. Scandal.
II
Plotinus & Western Esotericism
Mystics. Heretics. Engineers.
III
De Broglie, Bohm, and the Pilot Wave
Waves. Particles. Exile.
IV
Local Brains, Universal Consciousness
Orchestrated Objective Reduction vs. the de Broglie-Bohm Panpsychist Cosmos
V
Narrow Beam and Open Field
The Blindness that Cannot Detect Itself
Series I now has its own page, with the complete slide decks and speaker scripts available as PDFs. Sources and photographs will be added as the permanent lecture archive develops.
A way of working
Broad attention, not Academy doctrine.
The first lecture series repeatedly contrasted narrow, instrumental attention with a broader kind that notices relationship, context, ambiguity and the living whole.
That distinction helped shape the Academy, but it is not an entrance examination and certainly not a creed. The practical question is simpler: what happens when people are given conditions in which broader attention is possible?
Vallico is one attempt to find out.
2005 → 2026
Not starting from nothing.
The site first opened in 2005 as the Towler Institute, and became known as the Apuan Alps Centre for Physics through its regular programme of physics schools, workshops and conferences. Over the following years, physicists and students from around the world came to Vallico for extended periods of study, discussion and collaborative work.
The Academy is the continuation of that experiment with a wider field of view: more subjects, longer stays, a stronger connection to the village and landscape, and a working farm as part of the same place.
Towler Institute archiveResidencies
Come for long enough to get somewhere.
The formal residency programme is still being developed. The intended model is short- to medium-term stays for people with serious work or serious questions, with enough structure to create community and enough freedom to leave people alone.
The Academy is not yet running an open application system. Details will appear here as the programme develops.
About visiting Vallico