In 1985 Antonio Ratti created in Como the non-profit foundation that bears his name, with the desire to share his passion for art and textiles and to preserve his textile collection.

To this day, the Fondazione Antonio Ratti continues to promote research and experimentation in the artistic and cultural fields, involving scholars, established and emerging artists in a lively and open environment.

Presided over by Annie Ratti since 2002, FAR is based at Villa Sucota, a historic building on Lake Como. Here is preserved Antonio Ratti's extraordinary collection of ancient textiles, with over 30,000 artifacts from around the world, and a library open to the public containing over 7,800 volumes specialized in art, textiles, fashion, and applied arts. In 2022, the Fondazione Antonio Ratti committed to acquiring a library fund of over 9,000 volumes and to welcoming the generous donation of the textile collection of Seth Siegelaub by Marja Bloem, who inherited it in 2013, consisting of 723 items including tools, ritual objects, headdresses, garments, carpets, and fabrics from around the world, collected with the intention of investigating the social, political, and religious functions conveyed by clothing in non-European cultures.

Every year, the CSAV – Artists’ Research Laboratory program takes place here, conceived by Annie Ratti in 1995 to allow young international artists to deepen their practices and research through experimentation and dialogue with prominent figures in the contemporary art scene.

FAR also organizes a variety of courses, meetings, and seminars dedicated to various topics: from textile history to art theory, from cinema to permaculture.

Periodically, exhibitions are proposed in which textiles from the textile collection interact with works by contemporary artists, creating lively and unexpected connections between the two souls of the Foundation.

The spaces of the villa and the park, where the works of many of the artists who have collaborated with the Foundation are displayed, become places of meeting and discussion, making FAR a platform where visitors and specialists in textiles and art, scholars and researchers from all fields, intellectuals, citizens, entrepreneurs, and artists have the opportunity to meet, deepen their research, and rethink their perspectives.

For this reason, the Foundation is recognized internationally and is part of a broad network of similar institutions with which it weaves exchanges and relationships. At the same time, the headquarters at Villa Sucota – where FAR moved in 2010, thus becoming part of the Chilometro della Conoscenza project – places the Foundation in a broader cultural, architectural, and landscape fabric of the place, establishing itself as a cultural reference point for the city of Como.