La Rondinaia - Ravello

Even it is not accessible to the public it is impossible not to point out to the visitor one of the most beautiful villas in the whole Italian territory. It is located near one of the most famous villas in Ravello, the equally beautiful Villa Cimbrone. Enclosed in a beautiful natural garden, and attached to the rocks like a swallow's nest, Villa Rondinaia, built in 1904 for Sir Ernest William Beckett, Lord Grimthorpe, proprietor of the nearby Villa Cimbrone, is well known as having been the Italian residence of author, Gore Vidal. Gore Vidal arrived at Ravello for the first time with Tennessee Williams in 1948. He often returned to Ravello, and in 1972 he bought La Rondinaia, remained there for many months each year and wrote many of his works while here.

Gore Vidal had many important guests from the American political and cultural world at his home, strengthening the old ties that the villa has always had with the spirit, the taste and the sophisticated culture of the world overseas. Tennessee Williams, Styron, Bernstein, Paul Newman and his wife, Joanne Woodward, Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins, Peter O'Toole, Andy Warhol, Paul Morrisey, Rudolph Nereyev, Mick and Bianca Jagger, Sting, Dick Savett and first lady Hillary Clinton have visited the property and brought the beauty and the refined spirit of the Amalfi Coast to the whole world. Before all this, the villa, whose construction required building techniques and acrobatic operations on the part of building craftsmen who tied themselves from ropes hanging over the cliffs, remains a legend in the cultural history of the 1800s. During the 'Belle Epoque' the villa was frequented by world famous artists, guests of the aristocratic proprietress Lady Lucile, the second daughter of Lord Grimthrope. Here, much before the short-lived celebrities of today, lived Vita Sackville West, Virginia Woolf, Leopold Stokoswski and Greta Garbo, choreographic legends like Massine, painters like Escher and Miro', and writers Truman Capote and Rafael Alberti. Until September, 2005, only a few people were allowed access to the villa. Then, Gore Vidal, too old to get around the ample vertical property, gave up ownership to hotel entrepreneurs, who will give new purpose to the property and will open the gardens, terraces, salons, libraries and suites of what was and remains ,both architecturally and culturally, one of the most beautiful, mundane, artistic and literary parlour of the world.