Venue

The meeting will be held in the Aula Magna on the USI campus in Lugano, at the corner of Via Buffi and Corso Elvezia. The Aula is a mostly underground structure illuminated through glass ceilings, adjacent to the University's main building.

→ location on the campus map

→ travel directions

Italian Switzerland

Italian Switzerland is the Swiss region south of the Alps where Italian is the most common language. It consists of the Canton Ticino and part of the Canton Graubünden. It is a bridge between the Middle-European and Mediterranean cultures. With an average of over 2300 hours per year of sunny weather, Ticino benefits from mild winters and Mediterranean summers. It has the richest vegetation in Switzerland and it is famous for its contrasts: the eternal snow and glaciers of the St. Gotthardt massif are only a few kilometres away from charming lakeside towns where palm trees line the streets.

Lugano

With 56,000 inhabitants Lugano is the largest city in the Canton Ticino. It is the third financial centre in Switzerland, after Zürich and Geneva. The town's thriving economy provides an estimated 38,000 jobs, over a third of which are occupied by cross-border commuters from nearby Italy.

USI

The Università della Svizzera italiana (USI), literally the University of Italian Switzerland, is the only Italian-language university in Switzerland. It is based in Lugano and in the nearby town of Mendrisio. It is a young university. It was founded in 1996 and presently counts four faculties: Architecture, Economics, Communication Science, and Informatics. The Informatics faculty has English as its official language; the other faculties are Italian-speaking. The university's main building is a former hospital in neoclassical style. The other buildings have highly distinct, modern architectures.