Switzerland | Monte Verità: Matcha ice cream on the Mountain of Truth

Monte Verità: Switzerland's first tea plantation thrives on Lake Maggiore. Photo: Adobe Stock/marcovarro A huge field of lushly blooming tea plants, with a temple and a Zen garden in the middle. Japan? No, a hill in Ticino, 320 meters above Ascona and Lake Maggiore. Below, tourists stroll along the lakeshore. The intense blue glitters in the sun, boats rock on the water, and there is hardly a space left on the terraces of the cafés and restaurants. It is no coincidence that Ascona was recently named the “most beautiful village in Switzerland”. Dolce vita in the south of Switzerland, where it feels like Italy, but still has a sophisticated Swiss feel.

From the piazza a footpath leads between old villas to Monte Verità, the mountain of truth. Once at the top, I find myself standing in front of a Bauhaus-style hotel in the middle of green parkland. An oasis of calm. And I immediately feel: It's a world of its own, where you can escape the hustle and bustle of tourism in Ascona.

Traditionally, in the mild microclimate of Ticino, the much-celebrated camellias, magnolias and oleanders bloom between cypresses and other house-high trees. But Camellia sinensis, a Chinese tea plant native to Asia, is now also thriving on Monte Verità. In 2005, the well-travelled tea lover Peter Oppliger planted it, making his dream of having the first tea plantation in Switzerland come true. Right next door, the Casa del Tè invites you to taste green tea or matcha ice cream. Occasionally there are also ritual tea ceremonies that celebrate the Far Eastern spirit of serenity.

“That fits in a certain way with the philosophy that was propagated here over 100 years ago,” says city guide Carolina Peters, who I meet in front of the hotel. Around 1900, all kinds of life reformers, artists, health advocates, nudists, pacifists and anarchists came together here to found an alternative community far away from the industrialized north. They envisioned an alternative path between capitalism and communism. And the mountain in the sunny south seemed made for it.

As the Ticino native reports, it all began when the Belgian industrialist's son Henri Oedenkoven and his Saxon-born lover Ida Hoffmann, who had celebrated success as a pianist in Russia, Montenegro and Vienna, bought a 1.5 hectare property on the hill. They wanted to build a spa hotel on the overgrown vineyard to help city dwellers tired of civilization get back to real life. They called their project “Monte Verità” – Mountain of Truth. The couple was joined by the crazy artist Gusto and his brother, the ex-officer Karl Graeser from Transylvania. In the following years, several light-air huts were built for a simple, natural stay.

On the Mountain of Truth: Agriculture in the Vegetable Cooperative Monte Verità in 1907 Photo: Archives I walk with Carolina Peters to one of the Spartan dwellings, Casa Selma, which has been preserved near the tea plantation. Inside there is not much more than a bed frame. On the wall, the resident - or rather the resident - is asked to forego ironing their laundry in order to "achieve greater freedom" and to only straighten it by stretching and folding it. "The patients who came here were supposed to recover through light, air and sun, vegetarian nutrition and eurythmy," explains the guide and shows me strange, meter-high racks in the park: gymnastics equipment and shower facilities from 1902 - forerunners of the fitness paths of our day.

"It wasn't just in Ascona that people made fun of the nude dancers on the hill."

Gardening and dancing were also on the program back then. Later, as I wander through the museum in the lovely old Casa Anatta, the former home of the operators, I see old photos of people working the floors in reform clothes, barefoot or with sandals, their long hair held back by leather headbands. In other images, hippie-like people in white robes join hands to dance in a circle.

After the founders made a name for themselves through their extensive network - the first ever advertisement for Ticino, as Peters emphasizes - all sorts of illustrious guests showed up. Writers like Hermann Hesse, Else Lasker-Schuler, Erich Maria Remarque, Franziska von Reventlow and Erich Mühsam, who proclaimed the “Republic of the Homeless,” artists like Hans Arp, Alexej von Jawlensky and Marianne von Werefkin. Together with the dance school that Rudolf von Laban founded here in 1913, the dancers Isadora Duncan and Mary Wigman came, later followed by emigrants from the First World War. Possibly even Lenin and Trotsky stopped by Valkyrie Rock and Parsifal Meadow.

Not everyone will have subscribed to the statutes of the “individualistic vegetable cooperative,” which envisaged a life without luxury and “the crushing burden of material work,” but also called for general fraternization, common ownership of land, a vegetarian diet, and gender equality. Simply eating a diet without meat, milk, coffee, tobacco and alcohol may have been a challenge for some. Some people are said to have secretly sneaked into a nearby inn and devoured a hearty polenta with osso buco, as Peters says.

The project also gave rise to all sorts of ridicule and anecdotes. “It wasn’t just in the then fishing village of Ascona that people made fun of the Balabiott, the nude dancers on the hill,” says the guide. Apparently the builder of Villa Semiramis, the Art Nouveau villa in which I am staying, had the building built so high that from above you could see the goings-on on the grounds of the life reform project, including the naked ice cream. Later, tickets for stalking were even sold to curious people from the village.

In the meantime, people outside of Switzerland had also become aware of the legendary mountain. In the museum I discover an article in “Welt am Sonntag” from 1931 that talks about the “Fools of Ascona.” Meanwhile, Westermann's monthly magazines speak of "Berlin's outermost suburb" because, in the authors' opinion, the same weirdos set the tone there as in the German capital.

When the project ran out of money during the First World War, the utopia of a community striving for health, equality and truth disappeared surprisingly quickly. Ida Hoffmann and Henri Oedenkoven moved to Brazil with his new wife Isabelle Adderley. “Then, instead of the do-gooders, party people began to show up,” reports Carolina.

The dazzling bohemians in turn called on the wealthy Baron Eduard von der Heydt. The art collector and banker of Kaiser Wilhelm II bought the site for 160,000 francs and had the architect Erich Fahrenkamp build a Bauhaus-style hotel here in 1927. In 1964 he bequeathed his property to the canton of Ticino, and since then the Fondazione Monte Verità foundation has operated a seminar and congress center here together with the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich.

At lunch - the restaurant is also popular among Ticino residents with its excellent cuisine - I can now watch young scientists having lively discussions. There are also yoga retreats, meditation weekends, readings and lectures. The hotel and of course the museum are also open to everyone else. Just like the tea plantation, which attracts numerous visitors interested in culture.

This ensures that the historic site remains preserved and accessible to the public. A stroke of luck. Because it could also have fallen into the hands of greedy investors who would have turned it into a luxury hostel, like the ones that are plentiful down by the lake. Offers such as forest bathing, slowing down, mindfulness training, workouts and vegetarian or vegan nutrition warm up the very concepts that the life reformers experimented with on the mountain 120 years ago.

The dream of an earthly paradise has just been translated into an upscale lifestyle concept for wealthy guests. “It was the hippie colony on Monte Verità that made Ascona what it is today,” sums up Carolina Peters.

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