Ravello

Where it sits. Ravello stands at about 365 metres on a spur between the Dragone and Reginna valleys, six kilometres and a great many hairpins above Atrani on the Amalfi Coast. Because it sits back from the water rather than on it, the town looks along the coast rather than straight out to sea, and the view from its eastern edge takes in the whole sweep of the Gulf of Salerno as far as the Cilento — a horizontal panorama rather than the vertical drama of Positano. It is also several degrees cooler than the shore in August, which is why the medieval merchant families built here in the first place and why the nineteenth-century foreigners followed them.

The story behind it. Ravello was a wealthy offshoot of the maritime republic of Amalfi, trading with Sicily, Byzantium and the Levant from the ninth century onward. At its height it had perhaps 25,000 inhabitants — roughly ten times today's figure — its own bishopric from 1086, and merchant dynasties, the Rufolo and the Confalone among them, rich enough to build palaces in a style that borrowed openly from the Islamic Mediterranean. Pisan raids in 1135 and 1137 broke the Amalfitan republic, trade shifted north, and Ravello subsided into a quiet hill town of 2,500 people that happened to be full of extraordinary buildings.

The Duomo and the villas. The cathedral of Santa Maria Assunta was founded in 1086. Its bronze doors were cast by Barisano da Trani in 1179 and carry fifty-four panels of saints and biblical scenes. Inside, the pulpit given by Nicola Rufolo in 1272 and signed by Nicola di Bartolomeo da Foggia is one of the finest pieces of southern Italian medieval sculpture: a mosaic-encrusted box on six spiral columns standing on lions, with a portrait bust of Sigilgaita Rufolo beside the stair. A phial in the chapel is said to hold the blood of Saint Pantaleone and to liquefy on 27 July. A minute away, Villa Rufolo began in the thirteenth century as the family's town palace; its Moorish cloister of interlaced pointed arches survives, and the terraced gardens below were made after 1851 by a Scot, Francis Neville Reid, who bought the ruin and restored it. Richard Wagner visited on 26 May 1880, wrote in the guest book that he had found the magic garden of Klingsor for Parsifal, and gave the town its cultural identity. The Ravello Festival, running since 1953, still stages concerts on a platform cantilevered out over the cliff edge with nothing behind the orchestra but the gulf.

On screen. For a town of this size Ravello has an unusual film record. John Huston based the production of Beat the Devil (1953) here, with Humphrey Bogart, Jennifer Jones, Gina Lollobrigida and Peter Lorre living in the town while Truman Capote rewrote the script overnight, page by page, for shooting the next morning; the cast reportedly had no idea how the story ended until it did. The film flopped and then became a cult item, and Ravello has kept the association ever since. Christopher Nolan returned in 2019, basing the Italian unit of Tenet (2020) here while shooting the yacht sequence in the waters below. Earlier, the town's fame owed as much to who stayed as to what was filmed: in the spring of 1938 Greta Garbo, then the biggest star under contract at MGM, arrived with the conductor Leopold Stokowski and took a villa on the Cimbrone spur, setting off a siege by the international press that ran for weeks and produced some of the most reproduced photographs of her career. Gore Vidal bought La Rondinaia, a house built into the same cliff, in 1972 and kept it until 2004.

What you actually see today. The town is closed to through traffic and small enough to cross in ten minutes. The Piazza Duomo is the hinge: the cathedral on one side, Villa Rufolo's gate tower on the other, cafés between. Via San Francesco leads south past the church of San Francesco to Villa Cimbrone at the tip of the spur. The Auditorium Oscar Niemeyer, a low white concrete curve with a single circular window facing the sea, was designed by Niemeyer in 2000 and finished in 2010 after two decades of local argument; it is worth seeing precisely because it is so unlike everything around it. Ceramic workshops and lemon terraces fill the lanes below the centre.

Getting there and timing. SITA buses climb from Amalfi in about twenty-five minutes; the walk up from Atrani by the old stepped path takes an hour and a half and passes through Scala. Parking is limited to a garage at the entrance. The festival season runs from late June to September and pushes prices sharply upward; May, early June and late September are the best combination of open gardens, working restaurants and manageable crowds.