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Villa Cimbrone
Ravello, Italy · Independent · Accessible Luxury
Ernest William Beckett, later Lord Grimthorpe, bought a ruined 11th-century estate on the Cimbronium outcrop in 1904 and rebuilt it with a Ravello tailor named Nicola Mansi, stitching Gothic, Moorish and Venetian fragments salvaged across Italy into a single house. The gardens end at the Terrazza dell'Infinito, a parapet of eighteenth-century marble busts above a sheer drop to the Gulf of Salerno. Nineteen rooms sit inside the villa under frescoed vaults and Vietri majolica, and Lorenzo Montoro cooks for a Michelin star at Il Flauto di Pan, on a terrace framed by wisteria.
- 19 rooms
About Villa Cimbrone
- Gore Vidal, who lived just along the ridge at La Rondinaia, called the winter view from the Terrace of Infinity the most beautiful he had seen anywhere: sky and sea so vividly blue he could not tell one from the other.
- Greta Garbo ran away here with the conductor Leopold Stokowski in 1938. The escape leaked to the press and became an international story, and the hotel still rents the suite that carries her name.
- The Bloomsbury set treated the villa as a southern clubhouse. Virginia and Leonard Woolf, E. M. Forster, Maynard Keynes and Lytton Strachey all came, and Vita Sackville-West is said to have advised on the gardens.
- Beckett is buried in his own garden, under the Temple of Bacchus he built at the far end of the walk, with lines of Catullus cut into the frieze above him.
- The Vuilleumier family arrived in the 1960s, when Marco Vuilleumier was hired to look after the house for Beckett's heirs. The fifth generation runs the hotel today.
History
There has been a house on the Cimbronium outcrop above Ravello since at least the 11th century, passing through local families and then falling into ruin. Its second life began in 1904, when Ernest William Beckett, an English banker and Member of Parliament who would inherit the title Lord Grimthorpe, bought the wreck while travelling in Italy after the death of his wife. He hired Nicola Mansi, a Ravello tailor and builder he had met in England, and the two of them spent years assembling battlements, cloisters, terraces and small temples out of medieval fragments found on site and architectural salvage brought in from across Italy and beyond. Almost nothing of the original structure is still visible. What they made instead was a piece of pure invention: Gothic, Moorish, Venetian and English Romantic pieces set side by side on a cliff.
The gardens run along the rock face and finish at the Terrazza dell'Infinito, a long parapet lined with eighteenth-century marble busts looking out over the Gulf of Salerno toward the Cilento mountains. Beckett's connection to Violet Trefusis brought Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson to Ravello, and Vita is said to have given advice on the planting. The Bloomsbury circle followed: Virginia and Leonard Woolf, E. M. Forster, Maynard Keynes, Lytton Strachey. D. H. Lawrence, T. S. Eliot, Henry Moore and Winston Churchill all passed through. Greta Garbo hid here with the conductor Leopold Stokowski in 1938, and a plaque in the garden records it. Beckett died in London in 1917 and was brought back to be buried at the base of the Temple of Bacchus, with lines of Catullus on the frieze.
Marco Vuilleumier, from a hotelier family, was engaged in the 1960s as curator of the villa while it was still the residence of Beckett's heirs; the Vuilleumiers went on to own it and open it as a hotel, and the fifth generation of the family runs it now. There are nineteen rooms and suites inside the historic villa, several named for the people who shaped it, including the Ernest William Beckett suite under a frescoed vault with a carved stone fireplace and the Greta Garbo suite with its blue, white and pink Vietri majolica floor. Il Flauto di Pan, the hotel restaurant, holds a Michelin star under chef Lorenzo Montoro and cooks largely from the estate's own organic garden.
The setting
Ravello sits roughly 350 metres above the sea on a shelf between the Dragone and Reginna valleys, high enough that the Amalfi Coast traffic never really reaches it. The town grew rich on wool and trade under the maritime republic of Amalfi and has been drawing writers and composers ever since Wagner found the garden of Villa Rufolo and declared he had found Klingsor's magic garden. Villa Cimbrone stands at the far southern tip of the ridge, about a ten to fifteen minute walk from Piazza Duomo along stone-paved lanes; no car can reach the door, and luggage comes up by porter. Villa Rufolo, the Duomo and the Ravello Festival are all in the centre. Gore Vidal's La Rondinaia, built for Beckett's daughter Lucy, clings to the same cliff a short walk away. The villa's gardens are open to paying day visitors until early evening, so the Terrace of Infinity is a semi-public space by day and a private one after closing.
Restaurants and bars
- Mediterraneo — Restaurant · Italian
- Il Flauto di Pan — Restaurant · Fine dining · One MICHELIN Star
Awards
- MICHELIN Guide One Star (Il Flauto di Pan)
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