Europe > Italy > Amalfi Coast > Ravello > Articles > A Long Weekend in Ravello

Like a weary scholar prince meditating on the passing of empires, Ravello surveys the busy world below. Its beach rage, its limoncello hangovers, its petrol shortages.

Even in its days of greatest wealth and prestige, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Ravello was a cut above its neighbours. Down in Amalfi sailors swore and drank and paraded their lust, money was lent and lost, and galleons disgorged cargoes of spice and silk. Ravello's merchants came down to barter and cajole too; but the palaces they built on that stone raft a thousand feet up pretended - in the best courtly tradition - to have nobler origins. The only trade that actually went on in the town itself was dyeing. Other towns wove the fabrics; Ravello provided the colour.

The Ancient Romans were suspicious of anywhere they couldn't run a straight road through. Though there are some traces of Roman occupation along the Amalfi Coast - notably a patrician villa at Minori, below Ravello - the natives were mostly left alone with their donkeys, olives, and absurd gradients. So when Amalfitan merchants started to make small fortunes out of maritime trade in the tenth century, there were no memories of classical glory to inspire them.

Instead, they looked East, bringing back home décor ideas, fabrics, statues and whole bronze doors from trading posts in Constantinople, the Holy Land and Egypt. Rather like the Venetians - the difference being that Venice went on evolving: its Byzantine ogees and trefoils made room for Palladio and all that. Ravello, on the other hand, stopped building some time between the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, when its commercial luck ran out. It survived as a small, crumbling corner of Byzantium, where goats grazed around the spiral columns.

Until - halfway through the nineteenth century - this very decadence became a resource. A Scotsman, Neville Reid, passing through on his way between Amalfi and Naples, was utterly captivated. He bought the tumbledown Villa Rufolo, restored it according to the laissez-faire canons of the time, and acted as a fairy godfather to the village's near-destitute inhabitants. Soon, attracted by Reid's pro-Ravello propaganda, a succession of musical and literary foreigners came visiting. Wagner found inspiration for the Garden of Klingsor - the setting for Act Two of Parsifal - in Villa Rufolo's landscaped ruins. Ibsen, Gide, EM Forster and DH Lawrence all found Ravello a good place to scribble in; Gore Vidal still does. And for Greta Garbo it was the perfect backdrop for a bit of pre-war nookie with conductor Leopold Stokowlski.

Though water, electricity and the road all reached Ravello years ago, the Ozymandias mood can still be tuned into: especially out of season, and away from the coach tours. This is also one of the few parts of the world where one still occasionally spots that rarest of birds, the literary traveller, with his unlined black notebook and his creased linen trousers. Days later you might bump into him again in Urbino or Venice, or further afield: Prague, say, or Patmos, or Caracassone.



The griffin, the peacock, the lion, the eagle, the whale. Carved in stone or assembled carefully out of mosaic tessere, these are Ravello's familiars. Medieval emblems can be infectious after a while: the world suddenly becomes full of portents. As I strolled through the paradisical garden of Villa Cimbrone, a long black snake appeared from nowhere, slithered along the ground for a while, then climbed a pilaster and disappeared in a tangle of ivy. Three large Ameican tourists were all wearing exactly the same baseball cap. Most alarming of all, I was almost run over by a hearse later that day, on the coast road.

Ravello is also a place that sharpens one's appetite for high culture. At home, I don't generally get in a lather about pulpits; but I do here. The two in the cathedral are magnificent. The larger and later is a geometric dance of white marble and gold mosaics, borne up on the backs of six marble lions. Opposite, a humbler twelfth-century ambo has a paired mosaic motif, showing Jonah being eaten and then regurgitated by a twirly-tailed whale. The emerging prophet, tired but happy, gives his fans a reassuring little wave.

But my favourite pulpit - now we're on the subject - is hidden in the church of San Giovanni del Toro, opposite the closed, barred and scaffolded Caruso Belvedere hotel. Getting to see it is all part of the fun. In summer they sometimes open the church all day. But out of season, you'll have to plead with the tourist office, who will send you to the house of signora Maria, who, if she's not out doing the shopping or visiting any number of relations, may be willing to let you in - at her own pace.

And there it stands, in the middle of the nave: intricately sculpted, and inlaid, and even frescoed. Like most of us, it's not entirely perpendicular. The real treat, though, is a series of shimmering blue-green plates embedded in the side, between the Cosmatesque mosaics: twelfth-century Saracenic ware, on which Arabic characters are clearly visible. Normally the plates were broken up to make the mosaic tiles, but these were left intact to become a part of the design. Faux Moorish details abound in Ravello - the bar of the Hotel Palumbo, just down the road, luxuriates in them. But that's wishful thinking; here you see the real thing. Like the bas relief of a falconer in the Museo del Duomo, the pulpit of San Giovanni del Toro breathes the spirit of a confident, cosmopolitan merchant class with a taste for the good things in life.



Pretty much the kind of customer Ravello is trying to attract today, in fact. Hotels like the Palumbo or the Villa Cimbrone belong to families that first began taking in well-heeled paying guests in the nineteenth-century, and both exude Grand Tour atmosphere. But both also suffer from a chronic Ravello problem - limited space. Which is why the opening of the 43-room Palazzo Sasso hotel in 1997 was such a major event. Housed in a thirteenth-century merchant's house (built by Fra' Gerardo Sasso, who may or may not have founded the Kinghts of Malta), the new Virgin Group hotel is a Moorish peach-pink pile on the edge of Ravello's eastern ridge, with mesmeric views across the valley to Monte Avvocata and the sweep of the Bay of Salerno beyond.

There were teething problems - notably the absence of a swimming pool (followed by a yet more trying interregnum while it was built); and a certain international anonymity. But these are being ironed out: the pool is there, the manicured terraces that lead down to it are full of lazy sun loungers, and the whole place feels more laid back and lived in. Most important of all - in a town that was for long a culinary desert - is the hotel's world-class Rossellinis restaurant. Ambitious young chef Antonio Genovese is about to move on, taking his Michelin star with him; but his replacement, the management says, is committed to maintaining a standard that only one other Amafi Coast eaterie - the legendary Don Alfonso in Sant'Agata sui due Golfi - can aspire to.



If the life of the literary flaneur or the pool lizard begins to get to your waistline, there are any number of walks around Ravello. Most go either up or down; the advantage of the latter is that, once you arrive at the road (and you always do, sooner or later), there are frequent buses to bring you back up. The driver of the one I jumped on was playing Santana, loud, as he hurtled around the hairpins in the failing light. A party of first-time visitors winced and flinched in time with the music.

Before the road, there were only these paths: long cascades of steps leading down to Amalfi, Atrani or Minori on the coast; or rough mule tracks winding up into the chestnut-cloaked hills behind Ravello. The half-hour walk down to Minori is especially worthwhile: entirely paved, the path leads past four pretty chapels and clusters of houses, past lemon trees covered (in winter) in black nets against the frost. Minori itself has a small family-oriented beach, a good restaurant - L'Arsenale - and a Roman villa to visit.

Of all the walks, though, the most impressive is the one that leads into the Valle delle Ferriere. Opposite Ravello stands an equally ancient but sadly reduced Medieval settlement called Scala. At the southern edge of Scala is the fraction - as they say in Italy - of Minuto, which has two things going for it: a lovely, entirely unvisited Medieval church, the Annunziata (ask around for la chiave; somebody is sure to have it); and a small mule track that heads up and then left, following a contour line through a small wood where old men sit arguing over their cards. Then comes a yellow water tank. Then comes the wilderness: acres of it, suddenly rising up in walls of rock and fern to a soundtrack of rushing water, goat bells and the harsh caw of a bird which sounded to me like a chough (but I have only have the most tenuous idea of what a chough sounds like). Down below is Amalfi: its cathedral, its hotels, its lemon and almond cakes. And up here is pure, unadulterated nature: the sinew beneath the skin.



Or perhaps you prefer ruins. Pompeii is an hour's drive away: up over the Chiunzi pass, down through the urban blight of the Sarno plain, and there it is, the world's most famous stopped clock. But if you like your long weekend to have a unified theme, head south to Paestum instead.

The theme, of course, is Greece. In Ravello, the Greek world that ended with the Siege of Constantinople pulls out all the stops before the final fizzle. In Paestum, almost two thousand years before, the story was just beginning. The vigour and simplicity of the archaic Greek temple is partly a Romantic construct, as archaeologists now tell us that they were painted all sorts of garish colours. But the lines, at least, of these three temples that rise out of the plain, are boldly simple. No twirly spiral columns here; just striding edges and solid pediments.

Paestum was on the northern edge of Magna Grecia, the expansion of Greek commerce and culture that was at its most vigorous in Sicily and Calabria. Perhaps this distance from the mothership encouraged the colonists to go their own way. One certainly did so: a musician, who was determined that his tomb should have wall-to-ceiling frescoes. Not at all the done thing in 470 BC, but our man persisted - and the result is the so-called Tomb of the Diver, on display in the site's recently refurbished museum.

Around the four walls - now displayed flat, as panels - the dead man's friends and lovers, all male, lie around on couches drinking, playing instruments, flirting. On the lid, a naked man jumps off a pillar into the sea - which rises convex to receive him. To the left of this sea is a rudimentary tree, waving its frondy branches like tentacles. The diver, it seems, is the deceased, the pillar the limit of the known world, the sea the knowledge that lies beyond. The tree doesn't get a lot of coverage; perhaps it's just a tree. Outside, in the souvenir shops, the diver is reproduced on postcards, ashtrays, t-shirts and jigsaw puzzles. But none of this dilutes the impact of the real thing.



Ravello has its share of such moments too. That view down a row of weathered statues to the sea, in Villa Cimbrone: I'd seen it dozens of times before in photographs, and at least three in the flesh. But just as I was about to turn away, a sudden change in the light, the sun around the edge of a cloud, ambushed me into seeing it again.

If only I'd had my camera.

This article originally appeared in Conde Nast Traveller (UK)

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