Villa Cimbrone

Where it sits. Villa Cimbrone occupies the very tip of the rock spur on which Ravello is built, about ten minutes on foot south of the Piazza Duomo along Via Santa Chiara — a narrow, stepped, walled lane that gives almost no warning of what is at the end of it. The spur falls away on three sides. From the seaward edge the ground drops roughly 350 metres more or less straight into the Gulf of Salerno, so that the terrace at the end of the garden feels less like a viewpoint than like the prow of a ship. The name comes from cimbronium, the medieval term for this rocky outcrop, and the site is documented from the eleventh century, when it belonged to the Acconciagioco family.

The story behind it. What stands here now is essentially an Edwardian invention. In 1904 Ernest William Beckett — a Yorkshire banker and Conservative MP who inherited the title Baron Grimthorpe the same year — bought the ruined estate while travelling in Italy after the death of his wife. He rebuilt it over the following decade with the help of Nicola Mansi, a Ravello barber and self-taught builder who acted as his foreman, agent and designer. The two of them assembled the villa and its garden out of salvage and pastiche: cloisters copied from Amalfi's Chiostro del Paradiso, Gothic and Moorish fragments bought from demolitions across Campania, columns, bronzes, a crypt, a tea house, all arranged for effect rather than for archaeological honesty. The result should not work and does; it is one of the most convincing pieces of Romantic garden-making in Italy, and it takes visitors a while to realise almost nothing in it is original to the site.

The Terrace of Infinity. The garden's spine is the Viale dell'Immensità, a straight avenue of hydrangeas and clipped hedge that runs the length of the spur and deliberately hides the sea until the last few metres. It ends at the Terrazza dell'Infinito, a stone belvedere lined with eighteenth-century marble busts on plinths, salvaged from a Neapolitan villa, staring out over a void. Gore Vidal, who lived just below it for thirty years, called it the most beautiful view he had seen anywhere, and it is the single most photographed spot on the Amalfi Coast. Elsewhere in the garden are the Temple of Bacchus, a small domed rotunda over a bronze Ceres where Beckett's ashes were interred in 1917; the Rose Terrace; a grotto with a statue of Eve by Antonio Frilli; and a cloister with a copied relief. The planting mixes Mediterranean pine, cypress and wisteria with imported hydrangea and agapanthus that thrive in the humidity coming up off the sea.

On screen and in the visitors' book. Cimbrone's fame rests on a particular kind of celebrity tourism that predates and prefigures film tourism. Beckett's Bloomsbury connections brought a stream of guests between the wars: E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, Lytton Strachey and D. H. Lawrence all stayed, Lawrence during the period he was working on Lady Chatterley's Lover in 1926. The episode the town has never stopped talking about came in the spring of 1938, when Greta Garbo — then the most valuable star under contract at MGM and the most photographed recluse in the world — arrived at Ravello with the conductor Leopold Stokowski and took the villa. The international press laid siege to the town for weeks. The pictures that got out, of Garbo walking the hydrangea avenue and standing among the busts on the terrace, remain among the most reproduced images of her, and they turned an English eccentric's private garden into a place ordinary travellers wanted to see. Since then the terrace has served as a location for fashion campaigns, music videos and television, and the villa's cliff has appeared as background in productions based at Ravello, including the Italian unit of Tenet in 2019.

What you actually see today. The villa itself has been a hotel since 1960 and the interiors are for guests, but the gardens are open to day visitors for a modest ticket, from morning until sunset. The circuit takes about an hour at a slow pace: in through the cloister and crypt, along the Viale dell'Immensità to the terrace, then back through the rose garden, the tea house and the lower walks. The neighbouring house on the same cliff, La Rondinaia — "the swallow's nest", built in 1925 for Beckett's daughter and bought by Gore Vidal in 1972 — was sold in 2004 and has since been restored as part of the hotel estate.

Getting there and timing. There is no vehicle access; everyone walks the last stretch from Ravello's main square, which is level for the first half and then stepped, and porters are available for luggage if you are staying. Ravello itself is reached by SITA bus from Amalfi in twenty-five minutes. Go early. The terrace faces roughly south-west, so morning light is soft and the crowds are thin before ten; by the middle of the day the queue for the classic photograph on the belvedere can be twenty deep, and the marble takes on a hard glare. Late afternoon in September, with the gulf hazing over toward the Cilento, is the other good window.