The Giorgio Cini Foundation in Venice was founded in 1951 at the behest of Vittorio Cini, in order to remember his son Giorgio who tragically died on August 31, 1949 in a flight accident in Cannes and is the first example in Italy of the creation of a private organization that among its main aims humanistic research , in a period in which economy, science and technology were at the center of the collective interest.

The choice made by Vittorio Cini to place the Foundation on the Island of San Giorgio Maggiore is dictated by an extraordinary intuition. By electing the island as the seat of the Foundation and placing its recovery and restoration among the statutory purposes, Vittorio Cini nominated his creature as the heir of a centuries-old tradition, attributing to it the historical role and the vocation of the institution whose mandate he intended to take.

The first projects of the Giorgio Cini Foundation were aimed at solving some of the pressing problems that afflicted Italy and Venice in the immediate postwar period: on the one hand the need for professional training of young people and, on the other, the lack of means and structures dedicated to scientific and cultural research.

Today, the Giorgio Cini Foundation is an internationally known cultural institution that continues to draw inspiration from its original vocation and stands out for being, at the same time, a center of study and a place for meetings and debates on contemporary issues. A space in which scientific activity and reflection on political and social current events constantly overlap.