Villa Cimbrone

High on the ridge of Ravello, at the end of a footpath out of the town, the gardens of Villa Cimbrone end at a balustrade that seems to hang in mid-air. This is the Terrazza dell'Infinito, the Terrace of Infinity: a long belvedere lined with marble busts in the classical manner, standing on the edge of a cliff some 300 metres above the Gulf of Salerno, with the coast and its villages falling away below and nothing ahead but sea and sky. It is reached along the Viale dell'Immenso, the Avenue of Immensity, a walk beneath a pergola hung with wisteria in spring, past small gardens, bronze statues and old terracotta jars.

The villa itself is old. It is recorded from the eleventh century, belonged in turn to the Acconciajoco and Fusco families and later to a convent, and takes its name from Cimbronium, the rocky spur it stands on. Its present character dates from 1904, when the English banker Ernest William Beckett, later Lord Grimthorpe, bought the property and remade it, mixing neo-Gothic and classical elements: a cloister, a tea room, temples and grottoes. He is buried in the small Temple of Bacchus in the garden, beneath lines of Catullus.

The gardens blend an English feeling for wild, informal planting with Italian order, and Vita Sackville-West is said to have advised on them. Along the paths are fountains and pavilions, a statue of Ceres, and a rose garden whose Rose of Ravello was raised by Lucy Beckett in the 1930s. The guest list of the Beckett years is a roll call of English letters, including Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster, John Maynard Keynes, D. H. Lawrence and T. S. Eliot, and in 1938 Greta Garbo and Leopold Stokowski spent a secret holiday here, remembered by a plaque. The villa is now a hotel, but the gardens are open to the public.

Getting there

Ravello stands about 350 metres up on the Amalfi Coast, above Atrani and Amalfi, reached by road from the coastal Amalfitana highway and by local bus. Villa Cimbrone is in the car-free part of the town, about a ten-minute walk from Piazza Duomo along lanes and steps. Pagani, across the mountains on the inland side, is about 11 km away in a straight line, and Salerno Costa d'Amalfi Airport (QSR) about 26 km.