Federation of Spiritual Communities · Valchiusella, Italy
The Complete
Damanhur
Guidebook
Everything you need to know about the Federation of Spiritual Communities — from the underground temples and living metal science to how to visit, stay, and belong.
2026 Edition · The Definitive Reference
Begin the Journey ↓What is
Damanhur?
"Arriving at Damanhur for the first time is an experience that resists easy description. The valley holds you before you can name what you feel — a quality of light through the mountain pines, the faint sound of bells, and the sense that time here moves by different laws."
Damanhur is a living laboratory for the future — a federation of spiritual communities with its own constitution, culture, art, music, currency, schools and uses of science and technology. Founded in 1975 by Falco Tarassaco (Oberto Airaudi, 1950–2013), it has grown from a small group of visionary Italians into one of the world's most recognized and studied intentional communities. It is not a commune, not a religion, not a utopian retreat — it is all of these things and none of them, a category unto itself.
Spread across the Valchiusella Valley in the Canavese foothills of Piedmont, Northern Italy, Damanhur encompasses multiple territories connected by mountain roads and shared purpose. Hundreds of citizens live in nuclei — community households — pursuing work, art, spiritual practice, and governance in a form of participatory democracy that has been continuously refined for five decades. Thousands more around the world participate in Damanhur's teachings, events, and affiliate communities.
At its heart, Damanhur is an experiment in what human beings are capable of when they choose to build together from first principles — designing not just a lifestyle but an entire civilization.
Key Facts
How Damanhur Began
In the summer of 1975, a group of young Italians gathered around a healer, thinker, and visionary named Oberto Airaudi in the hills near Turin. They called themselves Damanhur — a name drawn from ancient Egyptian meaning "City of Light" — and began the slow, determined work of building a civilization from scratch. They were accountants, teachers, artists, and engineers. What united them was a conviction that the dominant culture had forgotten something essential, and that human beings were capable of far more than modernity suggested.
Over the following decades, they built homes and businesses, wrote a constitution, invented a complementary currency, developed original spiritual practices, and — in deepest secrecy — excavated a cathedral-scale complex of underground temples into the living rock of a mountain. That secret, when it was finally revealed in 1992, would make Damanhur world-famous. But the community was already, by then, something remarkable.
Recognition & Standing
Damanhur is a recognized member of the Global Ecovillage Network and has been cited by the United Nations as a model for sustainable community development. The Temples of Humankind have been described by visitors and journalists as among the most extraordinary artistic achievements of the twentieth century. In 2024, the Damanhur Welcome Center earned a Tripadvisor Travelers' Choice award — recognition from the broader world that something genuinely extraordinary is happening in this quiet Italian valley.
The Founder:
Falco Tarassaco
Oberto Airaudi (1950–2013), known within Damanhur as Falco Tarassaco — "Falcon Dandelion" — was one of the most remarkable and least-known figures of the twentieth century. A healer, painter, musician, author, game inventor, and spiritual teacher, he possessed a quality of attention that those who knew him describe as genuinely different from ordinary human experience — as though he perceived more dimensions of reality simultaneously.
"Falco believed that humanity was at a crossroads — and that the choice we make now, in this generation, will determine not just our future but the future of consciousness itself across the universe."
Early Life & Visions
Born in Torino in 1950, Airaudi showed extraordinary gifts from childhood. He reported vivid visions of past lives and other dimensions from an early age, and demonstrated remarkable abilities as a healer that brought people to his family home for help. As a young man, he studied esoteric traditions voraciously — from the Western mystery schools to quantum physics, from ancient Egyptian religion to Theosophical teachings — synthesizing them into an original framework that would become the intellectual and spiritual foundation of Damanhur.
In the early 1970s, he began gathering a group of seekers — people who felt, as he did, that conventional life was missing something profound. He spoke of a vision of underground temples that he had carried since childhood: vast sacred spaces carved into a mountain, filled with art that would serve as a bridge between the human and the divine. This vision was so concrete, so specific, that it became a shared project before a single stone had been turned.
Founding Damanhur (1975)
On 23 August 1975, Falco and a small group established the first nucleo community in the Valchiusella Valley. The choice of location was not arbitrary — Falco had mapped what he described as synchronic lines, currents of energy that circle the Earth like meridians on the human body. The valley, he said, sat at the intersection of two of these lines, making it uniquely suited to the kind of spiritual and physical work he envisioned.
In the years that followed, he guided the young community through its most testing periods — financial difficulties, internal conflicts, the challenge of sustaining a vision that most of the world would have called impossible. His authority was never coercive; it operated through the force of his thinking, his example, and the extraordinary results that seemed to attend his leadership.
Philosophy & Core Teachings
Legacy & Continuation
Falco Tarassaco passed away on 23 June 2013, at the age of 63. His death came on the summer solstice — a fact that the community received as characteristic of the man who seemed always to move in alignment with larger cosmic patterns. He left behind 26 books, hundreds of paintings, a community of hundreds of citizens, and the Temples of Humankind — perhaps the greatest single artwork created by a private individual in the twentieth century.
Damanhur did not collapse after his death, as many observers predicted. Instead, the community entered a period of collective leadership and deepened its democratic structures. His teachings, written and recorded over decades, continue to guide the community's spiritual and social life. Those who live in Damanhur speak of him with the particular kind of love reserved for someone who changed not just your beliefs but your experience of being alive.
Temples of
Humankind
There are places in the world that change you simply by existing — that make the ordinary categories of the possible feel suddenly insufficient. The Temples of Humankind are such a place. Carved by hand into the granite heart of a mountain in the Italian Alps, they constitute a cathedral-scale complex of interconnected halls, corridors, and sanctuaries decorated with mosaics, stained glass, sculptures, frescoes, and paintings of extraordinary beauty and symbolic density. They took three decades to build, were entirely secret for fourteen years, and have been called — by Italian authorities, international journalists, and the United Nations — among the most remarkable artistic achievements of the modern era.
"The Eighth Wonder of the World" — the description that emerged when Italian authorities finally entered the temples in 1992 and saw, for the first time, what this small community of visionaries had achieved beneath their mountain.
The Secret Construction (1978–1992)
Work on the temples began in 1978, three years after Damanhur's founding. A small core group, working with hand tools — pickaxes, chisels, and small pneumatic drills — began excavating downward through the bedrock. They worked in shifts, often through the night, maintaining the secret not only from the outside world but from many members of the community itself. The tunnels were disguised as a wine cellar. Rubble was removed and concealed. The scale of the ambition was staggering: not one underground hall, but an entire complex spanning nine thousand cubic meters across five stories.
As the space expanded, the community's artists filled it with work — mosaic floors assembled from thousands of hand-cut glass and stone tesserae, walls painted with figures from myth and esoteric tradition, stained glass windows through which light falls in slow, colored pools. The scale and quality of what they achieved with limited tools, limited funds, and no professional architectural support remains, to those who see it, almost incomprehensible.
In 1992, an unrelated legal investigation led Italian authorities to the community. When they discovered the temples, they initially ordered them demolished. What followed was one of the great reversals in Italian cultural history: an international outcry, the mobilization of support from artists, intellectuals, and politicians across Europe, and the eventual legal protection of the temples as a work of art. The demolition order was withdrawn. Damanhur had won — and the world now knew it existed.
The Halls
Hall of Spheres
The first and most celebrated hall, its domed ceiling and walls covered in luminous stained glass spheres that glow like captured stars. The mosaic floor depicts the synchronic lines of the Earth's energy grid. Sound and light interact here in ways that guide-visitors describe as physically perceptible.
Hall of Water
Dedicated to the element of water and the flow of life and time. Blue and green glass dominates — mosaics of swimming figures, underwater gardens, and rivers of light suggest immersion in a world beneath ordinary perception. A sense of gentle depth pervades the space.
Hall of Earth
Warmer tones of red, gold, and ochre evoke the material world and the ancient wisdom traditions. Alchemical symbols, manuscript-style inscriptions, and imagery from Egyptian, Mayan, and Celtic traditions create a visual library of humanity's sacred knowledge.
Hall of Mirrors
A meditation on infinity, consciousness, and the nature of self-perception. Mirrored surfaces multiplied with colored glass create the sensation of standing at the centre of an endless, luminous web — simultaneously everywhere and nowhere.
Blue Temple
The quietest and most intimate of the major spaces, the Blue Temple is devoted to contemplation and connection with divine forces. Falco described it as the temple's heart — the place where the energetic work of the entire complex converges.
The Labyrinth
A network of passages connecting the halls and descending toward the mountain's deeper levels. The labyrinth is understood not just as architecture but as a spiritual technology — its path replicating the journey through layers of consciousness toward the self's core.
Visiting the Temples
The Temples of Humankind can only be visited with a guided tour — this is both a practical necessity and a meaningful choice. The complexity, symbolic density, and sheer visual impact of the spaces require a guide who can provide context, answer questions, and help visitors navigate the experience. Tours are available in Italian, English, and German, and run year-round with varying frequency by season.
No photographs are permitted inside the temples. This restriction is rarely resisted by visitors who have been inside — the experience of being fully present without the intermediary of a camera or phone transforms the visit in ways that are difficult to articulate but universally reported. The temples must be seen with the whole self.
Selfica:
Living Metal Science
Among Damanhur's many original contributions to human knowledge, Selfica stands apart — a complete system for concentrating, directing, and interacting with life-force energies through coils of metals, special inks, and geometrical forms developed over decades of research. It is one of those ideas that sounds, to the uninitiated ear, either fantastical or fraudulent — until you spend time with the objects themselves, and with the people who work with them, and something in your experience begins to quietly insist that something real is happening.
"Selfica is not magic. It is a technology — ancient in its origins, entirely new in its modern development — for working with the subtle energies that physics has not yet adequately named."
Origins & Ancient Roots
Falco Tarassaco identified the principles of Selfica as connected to ancient Atlantean, Egyptian, and Etruscan traditions — traditions in which certain metals and geometrical forms were understood to concentrate and direct life energy. The spiral in particular — found in cultures across the world as a sacred symbol — is understood in Selfic science not as metaphor but as a functional form: a shape that, in metal, can act as an antenna, a concentrator, and a transmitter of subtle energies.
Modern Selfica, as developed at Damanhur, represents decades of systematic research: testing different metals and alloys, different geometries, different inks (which carry specific informational imprints), and different scales. The result is a body of practical knowledge encoded in thousands of unique objects created by trained Selfic artists.
How Selfic Objects Work
The basic principle of Selfica holds that coiled metal, when arranged in specific geometrical relationships, concentrates and directs life force — the subtle energy that traditional cultures have called prana, chi, orgone, or by dozens of other names. The metal acts as a physical structure through which this energy flows and is shaped. Special inks, applied to the metal or to associated materials, carry informational signals that determine how the energy is directed: toward physical health, mental clarity, emotional balance, protection, or spiritual connection.
Selfic objects are understood to be, in a very real sense, alive — not sentient, but active, processing and responding to the energetic environment around them. They benefit from periodic recharging in the Selfic laboratory, and from the ongoing relationship with the person who uses them.
Types of Selfic Objects
Synchronic Lines
Central to the Selfic worldview is Damanhur's mapping of what they call synchronic lines — currents of energy that flow around the Earth in a grid analogous to the meridians of the human body. Falco spent years developing methods for detecting and mapping these lines, which he believed could be worked with consciously to amplify spiritual development, facilitate healing, and support the kind of energetic work conducted in the Temples.
Damanhur's choice of the Valchiusella Valley was made, in part, because the valley sits at the intersection of two primary synchronic lines. The Temples themselves are positioned within the mountain specifically to work with these energetic currents — functioning, in Damanhur's understanding, not just as art and sacred space but as a kind of planetary acupuncture.
Sacred Woods
& Nature
Damanhur's relationship with the natural world is not that of stewardship or appreciation — it is one of active communication and collaboration. The forests that surround the community's territories are understood as living intelligences with whom relationship is possible, and the community has developed technologies and practices for making that relationship conscious and mutual. Walking through these woods, you do not feel simply in nature — you feel received by it.
Music of Plants
Perhaps Damanhur's most widely known contribution to the world's understanding of plant consciousness, the Music of Plants system converts the bioelectric signals produced by living plants — the subtle fluctuations in electrical potential across leaves, stems, and roots — into real-time musical output. A small device clips to a leaf and measures the plant's bioelectric variation; that data drives a synthesizer that translates the signals into melodic phrases and harmonies.
The results are not random noise — they are, unmistakably, music. Recordings of plant performances have been released commercially, drawing audiences who come not for novelty but for the genuine beauty and expressiveness of what they hear. Live performances in which musicians play alongside trees and garden plants — improvising in response to each other's output — create an experience unlike anything else in contemporary musical life. The plants, community members report, learn. Over time, a plant that has been performed with develops more complex and varied musical expression.
The Music of Plants device is now available for purchase, and workshops at Damanhur teach participants how to listen to and communicate with the plant world using this technology. It is one of those things that, once experienced, makes the familiar world feel suddenly richer and more populated than you realized.
Stone Circles & Megalithic Formations
The forests around Damanhur contain stone circles erected by the community over decades — megalithic formations aligned with astronomical events (solstices, equinoxes, lunar cycles) and positioned at points on the synchronic line grid that Falco identified as particularly energetically significant. They are not imitations of Stonehenge or other ancient sites; they are original works, designed according to Damanhur's own understanding of sacred geometry and energetic function.
Standing in one of these circles at dawn on a solstice morning, surrounded by ancient forest, with the Temples somewhere beneath your feet and the valley mist still burning off in the early light, is one of those experiences that people carry for the rest of their lives.
Tree Consciousness
Damanhur's research into plant consciousness extends well beyond the Music of Plants device. Community researchers have documented what they describe as communication between trees — using both the bioelectric signaling system and more traditional methods of sensitive observation. Individual trees in the Sacred Woods have been given names and are understood as long-term community members with their own characters, preferences, and histories. Some community ceremonies involve asking specific trees for guidance or blessing.
The Sacred Woods Temple
At the heart of the sacred forest stands the Sacred Woods Temple — an outdoor sanctuary where stone, water, and growing things are arranged in a complex sacred geometry designed to serve as both a ritual space and an energetic amplifier. Unlike the Temples of Humankind underground, the Sacred Woods Temple is open to sky and weather, changing with the seasons and providing a direct interface between the community's spiritual practice and the living world of nature.
The Spiritual
Path
Damanhur is not a religion — it holds no fixed doctrine, requires no singular belief, and does not position itself as the exclusive holder of spiritual truth. It is, rather, a spiritual path: a structured, evolving, richly detailed approach to human development that draws from ancient traditions, esoteric schools, and the original research of its founders to create something genuinely unprecedented. People of many religious backgrounds live and practice at Damanhur. What they share is not a creed but a commitment — to their own growth, to each other, and to the broader project of human evolution.
The Divine Spark
At the centre of Damanhur's spiritual anthropology is the concept of the divine spark — the understanding that every human being carries, within their deepest self, a fragment of divine intelligence: the same intelligence that, in Damanhur's cosmology, underlies and permeates all of reality. This spark is not a metaphor or a theological convenience — it is understood as a literal, detectable, developable aspect of the human constitution, one that spiritual practice can strengthen, clarify, and eventually return to conscious union with its source.
"We are the gods of tomorrow in embryo — the task is to remember what we already are, and to grow into it consciously rather than by accident."
The Way of the Oracle
One of Damanhur's most distinctive institutions is the Order of Pythies — the priestesses of the oracle. Drawing inspiration from the ancient Delphic tradition, the Pythies are trained practitioners who, through dedicated spiritual practice, develop the capacity to channel guidance from higher dimensions of consciousness. Once a month, at the Rite of the Oracle (held at the full moon), the Pythies speak to the community — answering questions, providing direction, and offering perspectives that community members describe as consistently valuable and sometimes astonishing in their accuracy and insight.
The Pythies are not mediums in the popular sense — they do not claim to speak for the dead, and their practice is situated within a rigorous spiritual and ethical framework. Training to become a Pythia is a years-long process of inner development and discernment.
The Great Rituals
Damanhur marks the astronomical calendar with four Great Rituals — celebrations of the solstices and equinoxes that constitute the spiritual pillars of the community's year. These are not symbolic occasions but practical spiritual workings: ceremonies designed to accomplish specific tasks in the energetic life of the community and, in Damanhur's understanding, of the planet. The winter solstice ritual, in particular, is regarded as among the most significant events in the community's year — a long, complex ceremony that the community has performed and refined for fifty years.
The Game of Life
Perhaps the most characteristically Damanhurian of all the community's institutions, the Game of Life is a spiritual game played by community members — an ongoing, evolving set of self-chosen challenges and commitments designed to facilitate inner development. Each player defines their own game, choosing areas of their life and character they wish to work with, setting challenges for themselves, and playing in relationship with other community members who serve as witnesses and mirrors. The game is taken seriously — but it is also genuinely fun, and its structure has proved surprisingly effective at generating growth.
Animal Guides
Every citizen of Damanhur takes a community name — not one they choose but one that is given, through a process of discernment that involves the community's oracular practices. These names are always two-part: an animal and a plant — "Falcon Dandelion," "Tiger Lily," "Wolf Oak." The animal component is understood as a guide: a quality of consciousness, an archetypal energy, with which the individual has a particular resonance and from which they can learn. The relationship with one's animal guide is an ongoing aspect of the community's spiritual practice.
The Esoteric School
The Esoteric School is Damanhur's core educational institution for spiritual development — a multi-year curriculum of teachings, practices, and initiations that form the backbone of the community's inner life. The school's teachings are organized in levels and cover an extraordinary range of material: from the principles of Selfic science to practical energy work, from the history of esoteric traditions to the specific cosmology and practices developed by Falco Tarassaco. Participation in the school is not mandatory for community members, but it is the primary vehicle through which the depth of the Damanhurian path is transmitted.
Community
Life
For fifty years, hundreds of people have chosen to live in intentional community at Damanhur — sharing resources, governance, and purpose in a way that the dominant culture rarely even tries to imagine, let alone achieve. What emerges from that sustained commitment is not a simplified life but a richer one: more complex in its social relationships and responsibilities, more demanding in its spiritual expectations, and — by the account of those who live it — more genuinely satisfying than the alternatives.
The Nuclei — Community Households
The basic unit of life at Damanhur is the nucleo — a community household of typically fifteen to twenty-five people who live together, share expenses, cook and eat together, and collectively navigate the practical and interpersonal challenges of shared life. Each nucleo has its own name, its own character, and its own particular flavor of community culture. Some are known for their artistic orientation; others for their entrepreneurial energy; others for the particular depth of their spiritual practice.
Living in a nucleo is not described as easy by those who have done it — the intimacy, the constant negotiation, the impossibility of significant self-deception when twenty people know your daily life — but it is described as transformative in ways that more private living arrangements rarely are.
The Constitution
Damanhur operates under its own written constitution — a document developed over decades that governs the community's structure, rights, and responsibilities. The constitution is not a fixed text but an evolving one, amended through the community's democratic processes as circumstances and understanding develop. It establishes the rights of citizens (including the right to leave, taking their invested resources), the structure of governance, and the principles that guide collective decision-making.
The Popolo — Participatory Democracy
The Popolo is Damanhur's primary governing assembly — a gathering of the full community at which significant decisions are made collectively. The Popolo meets regularly and operates according to principles of participatory democracy refined over five decades of practice. Its processes are elaborate, sometimes contentious, and — in the account of community members — genuinely satisfying in a way that representative democracy rarely manages. The experience of having real agency over the conditions of your collective life turns out to change people in fundamental ways.
The Credito — Damanhur's Currency
Damanhur operates its own complementary currency — the Credito — which circulates within the community economy and has been used in various forms since the early years of the community's history. The Credito enables the community to direct economic energy within its own territory, to value kinds of work that the broader economy undervalues (artistic, spiritual, care), and to maintain a degree of economic sovereignty. It is not a cryptocurrency and is not traded externally, but its use within the community is substantial.
Education
Children born and raised in Damanhur are educated in the community's own schools — institutions that combine standard Italian curriculum requirements with a distinctively Damanhurian approach to learning. Art, music, nature, and spiritual awareness are woven through the educational experience from the beginning. Children grow up in multi-generational community, with access to a wide range of adult mentors and a rich communal life that provides a very different kind of childhood from the isolated, screen-mediated experience that characterizes much of contemporary childhood.
Becoming a Citizen
The path to becoming a full citizen of Damanhur is structured and gradual, involving three stages of increasing commitment. Initial contact and visits lead to an extended trial period during which the prospective citizen and the community assess their compatibility. This is followed by a period of formal candidacy before full citizenship is granted. At each stage, both the individual and the community have the opportunity to reflect honestly on whether the fit is right. Not everyone who begins this process completes it — and the community's openness about this is one of the features that distinguishes it from more coercive intentional communities.
The Academy
& Schools
Damanhur University and its associated mystery schools offer an education that cannot be found anywhere else on Earth — a curriculum for the evolution of consciousness that draws from the deepest wells of human wisdom while remaining firmly grounded in practical experience. Students come from around the world for intensive courses, multi-year programs, and short immersive workshops. What they encounter is not theory but lived knowledge, transmitted by practitioners who have been doing this work for decades.
Damanhur University
Offers regular courses and workshops in a wide range of subjects — from Selfic science and sacred art to sustainable community design. Many courses are available online, bringing the community's knowledge to a global audience while in-person intensives offer the depth of direct transmission.
The Mystery School
The core of the Esoteric School — multi-year teachings covering the full range of Damanhurian spiritual science. Organized in progressive levels of initiation, it represents the accumulated spiritual research of fifty years of community practice.
Alchemy & Inner Research
The art and science of transforming the self through sacred practice — drawing from alchemical traditions both Western and Eastern, and from Damanhur's own research into the processes of inner transformation. Intensive retreats and year-long programs.
The Dream School
One of Damanhur's most beloved offerings — a systematic approach to lucid dreaming, dream interpretation, and the use of the dream state as a vehicle for healing, problem-solving, and spiritual development. Abaton guesthouse guests have access to Selfic dream-enhancement environments.
The School of Healers
Training in Damanhur's holistic healing arts — integrating Selfic healing, energy work, plant medicine, and traditional healing approaches. Graduates serve both the internal community and the broader public through the community's healing centers.
The Way of the Oracle
Training for those with the calling and capacity to develop their oracular gifts — a rigorous multi-year program of spiritual development, discernment practice, and practical work with the Pythi order.
Learning at Damanhur
What distinguishes learning at Damanhur from almost any other educational experience is the environment in which it takes place. Theory and practice are never separated. The community itself is the laboratory. Students who come for a course find themselves embedded in a living social experiment — eating with community members, visiting the temples, attending events, and encountering the application of the ideas being studied in the daily life of several hundred people who have been living them for years. This immersive quality changes what is possible in a student's learning in ways that classroom education cannot replicate.
Arts &
Culture
At Damanhur, art is not decoration and culture is not entertainment — both are understood as technologies for human transformation and for direct engagement with the forces that underlie visible reality. Every art form practised at Damanhur carries within it an intention that transcends aesthetics: to open the senses, to strengthen the divine spark, to build bridges between the human and the sacred. The result is a body of artistic production that is unlike anything being made anywhere else in the world — technically accomplished, symbolically rich, and energetically alive in a way that visitors consistently report as perceptible.
Sacred Mosaic
Mosaic is perhaps Damanhur's primary visual art form — developed over decades to the highest technical and spiritual levels. The mosaic floors and walls of the Temples of Humankind represent an achievement in this medium that has few parallels in contemporary art. Each tesserae is hand-cut and placed with an attention to both aesthetic quality and energetic function. The materials — glass, stone, metal — are selected and prepared according to Selfic principles, making the finished mosaic not just visually beautiful but energetically active.
Damanhur's mosaic workshops are among the most popular offerings for visitors — a hands-on encounter with a practice that is both technically demanding and meditative, and that connects participants directly to the artistic tradition of the Temples.
Stained Glass
The great stained glass installations of the Temples — most dramatically in the Hall of Spheres, where spherical forms glow with complex internal light — represent a development of this ancient medium into something entirely new. The glass is designed not just to be beautiful but to interact with the energetic quality of the space, filtering and directing light in specific patterns that serve the spiritual function of each hall. Community glassworkers continue to develop and refine this practice, and stained glass remains one of the primary art forms taught in community workshops.
Selfic Painting
Selfic painting represents one of Damanhur's most original art forms — large-format works combining sacred geometry, figurative imagery, and Selfic inks applied in specific patterns to create paintings that function as energy devices. These are not paintings about Selfic principles — they are Selfic objects, operational instruments designed to work in a space in the same way that a more conventional Selfic object might work in relation to a person. Major Selfic paintings exist throughout the Temples and community spaces.
Sacred Music
Music at Damanhur has always been central to community life — from the sacred compositions performed in the Temples to the music that accompanies the Great Rituals and the performances with plants. The community has produced dozens of recordings of original music across genres, from choral works of considerable complexity to electronic compositions that incorporate plant signals and Selfic frequencies. Live music is a constant feature of community life, and the Music of Plants performances — with human musicians improvising alongside trees and gardens — represent one of the most unusual and genuinely beautiful musical experiences available anywhere in the world.
Gaian TV
Damanhur produces its own media through Gaian TV — an online channel that broadcasts documentaries, interviews, live events, and educational content from the community and from aligned thinkers and practitioners around the world. For people outside Italy who want to maintain connection to the community's life between visits, Gaian TV offers a genuine window into what is happening at Damanhur in real time.
Sustainability
& Ecology
Damanhur does not use the language of sustainability in the abstract — it lives it, practically and imperfectly, and has been doing so for fifty years before sustainability became a widespread cultural value. The community's ecological record is the record of a community trying to build a complete civilization within the limits of a particular valley, learning by doing, making mistakes and correcting them, and arriving at approaches that work because they have been tested by decades of genuine lived experience.
Bio-Architecture
Buildings at Damanhur are designed according to the principles of bio-architecture — an approach that understands buildings as living systems in dialogue with their occupants and their environment. Natural materials are preferred: stone, wood, earth, lime. Sacred geometry informs the proportions and spatial relationships of interior spaces. The orientation of buildings is determined in relation to solar movement, magnetic north, and the community's mapping of energetic currents in the land.
The result is buildings that feel, to most visitors, qualitatively different from conventional construction — more alive, more comfortable in a way that is difficult to specify but consistently reported. The community's guesthouses, community centers, and shared spaces all demonstrate these principles in practice.
Organic Agriculture
Damanhur produces a significant proportion of its own food through organic agriculture practiced on community lands. The community's approach to farming integrates bio-dynamic principles (including attention to lunar and stellar cycles), extensive composting and soil-building, and the principles of permaculture design. Community members who work in agriculture describe it as one of the most spiritually satisfying dimensions of community life — a daily practice of relationship with the living world that grounds and nourishes the community's more esoteric activities.
Energy & Renewables
Damanhur has invested heavily in renewable energy systems — solar, wind, and micro-hydro — and continues to develop experimental energy approaches drawn from its research into synchronic lines and Selfic science. The community's energy vision extends beyond conventional renewables to include what Falco described as the possibility of working directly with the Earth's own energy fields as a source of clean, abundant power — research that continues in the community's laboratories.
Permaculture & Land Design
The community's territories are designed according to permaculture principles — the land organized into zones of intensity based on human use patterns, with forests, meadows, gardens, and buildings arranged to maximize the productive and ecological relationships between different land types. The Valchiusella Valley, already a landscape of considerable natural beauty, has been further enriched by decades of careful land stewardship — reforestation, stream restoration, habitat creation, and the establishment of sacred spaces that provide refuges for both wildlife and human contemplation.
Roadmap 2030
Damanhur has articulated a vision for the decade ahead that deepens its commitment to ecological living while expanding its outreach and influence. The roadmap includes targets for food self-sufficiency, energy independence, expansion of educational programming, and the development of affiliated communities and projects around the world. The community approaches 2030 not as a deadline but as a horizon — a direction of travel that organizes effort and attention toward specific, meaningful goals.
Calendar
2026
Damanhur's year is organized around the great rhythms of the astronomical calendar — solstices and equinoxes — supplemented by community commemorations, monthly rituals, and weekly gatherings that give shape to the community's collective time. For visitors planning a trip, arriving in alignment with one of these events can transform the experience from interesting to profound.
Great Rituals & Community Celebrations
2026
2026
2026
2026
2026
2026
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Regular Events
Sunday
Sunday
Full Moon
Visiting
Damanhur
Everything you need to plan your journey to one of the most extraordinary places in the world — transport, accommodation, tour options, and the etiquette of visiting a living spiritual community.
Getting There
Damanhur is located in the Valchiusella Valley, approximately 50 kilometres north-east of Turin, in the foothills of the Italian Alps. The nearest town is Vidracco, and the community's main Welcome Center is at Damjl, in the Nucleo Damanhur Crea territory. The valley is beautiful, the roads are mountain roads, and the approach — whichever direction you come from — prepares you for arrival in a way that feels entirely appropriate.
- Turin Caselle Airport (TRN) — Closest airport. By car via A4/A5 motorways~45 min
- Milan Malpensa Airport (MXP) — Alternative option. A4 westbound then A5 north~1h 30 min
- Milan Bergamo Airport (BGY) — Budget airlines hub. Longer route via A4~2 hours
- By Train — Turin Porta Nuova → Ivrea (Trenitalia). Then GTT bus to Vidracco~1h 45 min
- Taxi from Turin Airport~€70
- Taxi from Milan airports€180–€250
- Taxi from Ivrea~€30
- Parking — Free at all community territoriesFree
Accommodation
Abaton: Sacred Dreams
Connected to the Temples · Lucid Dreaming SpecialistFive uniquely designed rooms set up with Selfic circuits specifically configured for lucid dreaming and inner exploration. Each room connects to the energetic field of the Temples of Humankind — guests report unusually vivid and meaningful dream experiences. The proximity to the Temples means that some visits to non-public areas are possible for Abaton guests at special times.
Ali del Falco
The Damanhur Guesthouse · Bio-Architecture & Community LifeA bio-architecture guesthouse adjacent to Nucleo Aval — the nucleo where Falco Tarassaco himself lived and worked. Set among fruit trees, with a wine pergola and views across the valley to Turin on clear days. A fire-pit for evening gatherings, a spiral garden walk, and the daily life of a living community just beyond the door. The most immersive way to experience Damanhur as community rather than destination.
Visit Options & Prices
All temple visits must be booked in advance through the Damanhur Welcome Center. Tours are available in Italian, English, and German. Children under five years typically visit free; reduced rates apply for children 5–12.
| Experience | Duration | Languages | Price |
|---|---|---|---|
| Classic Visit Standard temple experience — the essential Damanhur journey |
Half day | EN / IT / DE | ~€78 |
| 4 Halls Italian Focused experience in four of the primary halls |
~2–3 hours | IT | €55 |
| One Day Visit Complete, comprehensive single-day experience |
Full day | EN / IT / DE | €140 |
| In-Depth Classic Visit Extended comprehensive access with specialist guide |
Extended | EN / IT | €300 |
| 3-Day Experience: Art & Community Immersive multi-day program |
3 days | EN / IT | from €11 |
| 3-Day Sacred Conversations Dialogue and depth immersion |
3 days | EN / IT | from €33 |
| 3-Day Sacredness of Life Spiritual immersion program |
3 days | EN / IT | from €11 |
Cultural Sensitivity
Damanhur is a living spiritual community, not a tourist attraction. The people you encounter are not performing for visitors — they live here. Bring your curiosity, your openness, and your respect.
Dress modestly when visiting sacred spaces — shoulders and knees covered, as you would for any sacred site in the world. Ask permission before photographing community members; many will agree, and the conversation that follows is often one of the best parts of the visit. Engage with questions rather than assumptions. Come prepared to be surprised by what you encounter, and by what you discover in yourself.
Damanhur
Worldwide
The influence of Damanhur has spread to more than thirty countries — through affiliated communities and contact groups, through the Damanhur Foundation's cultural outreach, through Damanhur University's online programs, and through the travels of community members who carry the Damanhurian approach to life into every continent. This global network is not an empire — it is a constellation, each point maintaining its own character while connected by shared principles, ongoing communication, and regular events.
Affiliate Communities
In several countries — notably the United States (through Damanhur USA), Germany, Brazil, and Japan — formal affiliate communities and contact groups provide local access to Damanhur's teachings and culture. These communities vary in size and format: some are residential intentional communities; others are networks of practitioners who gather for events, study, and mutual support. All maintain a living connection to the community in Italy through visits, online participation in courses and events, and the integration of Selfic objects and practices into their daily lives.
The Damanhur Foundation
The Damanhur Foundation serves as the primary vehicle for cultural outreach — organizing international events and conferences, supporting research into the community's unique approaches to art, science, and social organization, and building relationships with aligned institutions and individuals worldwide. The Foundation has been instrumental in establishing Damanhur's academic credibility, supporting the work of researchers from universities across Europe and North America who have studied the community from sociological, anthropological, and artistic perspectives.
Publications & Media
Damanhur has published extensively over its fifty-year history — books by Falco Tarassaco translated into a dozen languages, community publications, academic studies, and documentary films. The community's media arm continues to produce content through Gaian TV and social media channels that reach a global audience of hundreds of thousands of people. For those who cannot travel to Valchiusella, this media presence provides a genuine and ongoing connection to the community's life and thought.
International Events
Damanhur hosts international visitors and delegates regularly — for the Great Rituals, for the community's conference programs, and for the special events organized around significant astronomical moments. An annual international gathering brings together affiliate community members from around the world for several days of shared practice, community update, and celebration. For longtime students and practitioners of the Damanhurian path, these gatherings are among the most significant events of the year.
Connecting from Anywhere
Further
Learning
Damanhur has generated a remarkable body of literature, documentary material, and academic study over its fifty-year history. The following resources represent the best starting points for those who want to go deeper — whether you are a first-time visitor wanting context before your trip, a researcher approaching the community academically, or a practitioner seeking to integrate Damanhurian knowledge into your own life.
Books by Falco Tarassaco
Falco Tarassaco was a prolific author, and many of his books are available in English translation. Among the most essential:
Synchronicity: You Are Not Alone
An accessible introduction to Falco's understanding of the meaningful patterns that structure reality — and how to recognize and work with them in daily life.
The Traveler's Guide to the Temples
The essential companion for visitors to the Temples of Humankind — explaining the symbolism, the history, and the spiritual purpose of each hall and its contents.
Esoteric Physics
Falco's attempt to articulate the relationship between the community's spiritual science and the findings of contemporary physics — ambitious, idiosyncratic, and consistently interesting.
Stories and Songs of Damanhur
A collection of the myths, stories, and musical compositions that form the cultural substrate of life at Damanhur — a way into the community's imaginative world.
Official Websites
Documentaries
Several documentary films have been made about Damanhur, ranging from brief journalistic pieces to extended explorations. The most thorough and sympathetic treatment to date is the Italian documentary series that accompanied the opening of the Temples to the public. Available clips and full documentaries can be found through Gaian TV and the community's YouTube channel.
Academic Study
Damanhur has attracted the attention of researchers in sociology, anthropology, religious studies, architecture, and environmental science. The community has been the subject of peer-reviewed studies in journals ranging from the Journal of Contemporary Religion to Urban Studies. Key academic works include Massimo Introvigne's sociological analysis, Jeff Merrifield's architectural study (Damanhur: The Real Dream), and various contributions to the academic literature on new religious movements and intentional communities.
The community is generally open to academic researchers who approach with genuine curiosity and ethical seriousness. Inquiries about research access should be directed to the Damanhur Welcome Center or the Damanhur Foundation.
Damanhur Online Courses
Damanhur University offers a growing range of online courses that bring the community's knowledge to a global audience — covering Selfic science, sacred art, dream practices, sustainable community design, and the principles of the Damanhurian spiritual path. These courses are taught by practitioners with decades of experience and combine recorded lectures with live sessions, practical exercises, and community with other students around the world. They represent the most accessible entry point for those who cannot travel to Italy but want something more than books and documentaries.
"Damanhur is not a place you visit and then leave behind. It is a place that visits you — returning in your dreams, your questions, the moments when the ordinary world seems, briefly and unmistakably, insufficient."
The Complete Damanhur Guidebook · 2026 Edition
Federation of Spiritual Communities · Valchiusella Valley, Piedmont, Italy