NEWTON proposes a revolutionary approach of a converged wireless-optical network architecture that makes reality an efficient 6G Cell-Free (CF)-based access network for high-density and high-coverage deployments. The proposed architecture takes also full advantage of novel solutions for both the radio-edge and regional-edge domains, as well as for efficient network-management approaches, targeting to achieve sub-second latency, more than million devices per square kilometer connection density and user-experienced data-rate up to 10Gbps. NEWTON research program will engage in cutting-edge research to advance and assess a wide range of techniques, tools and methodologies that will harness the innovative capabilities provided by the CF technology to their fullest extent and establish the groundwork for efficient end-to-end services in 6G network environments. The NEWTON approach will be directed toward pursuing three ambitious objectives, each aligned with an interdisciplinary but interconnected research domain. The three objectives are linked to challenges at the radio-edge, the regional-edge, and the network-management domains. At the radio-edge domain, NEWTON aims at developing Artificial-Intelligence (AI)-driven models in the access domain, focusing on the CF technology, targeting the efficient acquisition of the Channel State Information (CSI) in dense CF networks, while supporting infrastructures with high-number of antennas. In the regional-edge domain, NEWTON targets to develop scalable solutions for the interconnection of data-centers, to enable distributed neuromorphic architectures, while also being in line with the Open RAN initiative. Finally, at the network management domain, NEWTON will develop novel AI-based resource allocation solutions, targeting the optimal utilization of both networking and computational resources.