Monte Verita' is the hill above Ascona, a small town on the shores of the Lake Maggiore in the south of Switzerland. It was named 'Mount of Truth' by a Theosophist colony settled there in the early 1900's. In the first halve of the 20th century, Switzerland attracted many exponents of the international reforming thinking. The south in particular, with its favourable climate and extraordinary light intensity, offered the perfect location for a new beginning. At a time when psychoanalysis offered relief to the malaise of modern times, and Anarchy brought fresh wind in international politics, members of the privileged classes hoped that a return to more archaic ways of life may cure them from the discontents of civilization.

This was the ideological climate behind the colony on the Monte Verita'. Its inhabitants came from northern countries, led simple lives in small wooden huts, practiced a vegetarian diet and worshipped nature. Sadly like most idealistic ventures, the utopia of the return to nature was short lived ... but Ascona remained an important cultural centre. Again the anarchic thinking seemed to be rooted there. At the end of the 1910's Ascona was with Zurich, home of the Dada movement. If cities were fertile ground for the 'café literaire' culture, Ascona provided an escape, like Hugo Ball pointed out, from - the 'isms' as the worst form of bourgeois thinking (Modernism, Dadaism, Expressionism etc.).