Villa Cimbrone is a fair walk from the center of Ravello, along via San Francesco, which climbs up past the reworked Gothic church and monastery of the same name, and via Chiara, which does the same. But it is an enchanting place, one of the real highlights of the Amalfi Coast, and well worth the trek, even though, when you get right down to it, Villa Cimbrone is completely modern.

This villa as built at the beginning of the XX century by Lord Grimthorpe, whose also designed London’s Big Ben. It is in a medieval-like style and includes a building with two towers and a courtyard, a peculiar combination of ancient fragments. On the groundfloor, a hall with Gothic arches opens on to the sea, offering a suggestive view of the coast. The garden of the villa is rightly famous for its beauty. It adorned with beds of camellias, roses, hydrangeas, begonias and wonderful exotic plants. A long avenue, flanked with ornamentalstatues, leads to the Cimbrone belvedere, situated on the end of the spur on which Ravello rises.

The view You can enjoy from this place is exceptional: Your eyes sweep the whole area from Atrani to the gulf of Salerno, to the plain of Paestum and Punta Licosa. In its heyday in the 1920s it hosted most of the Bloomsbury group; later, the reclusive Greta Garbo and conductor Leopold Stokowski used it as their love nest