Location

The School will be held in Villa Monastero, in Varenna.
Varenna is a beautiful small town on the eastern shore of Lake Como, and constitutes a tourist attraction. It is rich of historical monuments and is located in a charming geographical area, close to Milano, to which it is connected by trains and buses.

As the name suggests, Villa Monastero was originally a Cistercian monastery dating from 1208. The foundation followed the escape of the orders of San Faustino and Giovita from the nearby island, Isola Comacina, which rivaled with Como for the control of the region, and which was sieged and destroyed on 1196.

The nuns community lived for several centuries in prayer, but after a long period of isolation some of them were tempted to indulge in more mundane activities.
Around the middle of the 15th century, the knowledge of the nuns behaviour was widespread in the region, and the gossip eventually reached Milan. Instead of a place devoted to prayer and pentenance, people talked about the Monastery as a "house of loving maids", a definition not appreciated at all by one of the most austere member of the local clergy: the saint Archbishop of Milan, Cardinal Carlo Borromeo.
The Archbishop asked and obtained from pope Pio V the decree of closure of the order. The remaining nuns moved to nearby Lecco, and the building, in such an enchanting location, was sold to a local nobleman, Paolo Mornico, in 1569.
The son of the owner refurbished the place at the beginning of the 17th century transforming the monastery into a noble residence and "building gardens where before the lake was".

In the mid-19th century the villa was sold again and changed owners several times. Important architectural changes to the building and the park were made by the following owners, especially by the german Walter Kees, who owned the villa from the end of the 19th century to the time it was confiscated by the Italian governement following the beginning of the World War I.
In 1925 the villa was sold to Marco de Marchi, who in 1926 donated it to the Italian government to host the italian hydrobiology and limnology institute.

In 1953 following the wishes of Professor Polvani, President of the Italian Society of Physics, and of Mr. Bosisio, President of the Provincial Authority of Como, the complex was inaugurated as a study and congress centre.
The Nobel Prize winner Enrico Fermi, to whom one of the most important rooms is dedicated, took part in the first conference on Physics.
In 1977 the CNR, the Italian Council for Research, took over the ownership of the villa and, in 1996, the management was passed on to the Province of Lecco who promoted its development as a congress centre.

Villa Monastero is composed of a big conference room (Sala Fermi, 100 seats), several smaller rooms and 12 bedrooms.