Ravello and its villa gardens

Two Historic Terraced Gardens Above The Amalfi Coast, Villa Rufolo Of The Thirteenth Century And Villa Cimbrone, Within The UNESCO Costiera Amalfitana Cultural Landscape · Ravello, Campania

Ravello sits about three hundred and fifty metres above the Amalfi Coast on a shelf between two gorges, and the reason to make the climb is two gardens. Villa Rufolo is the older, a thirteenth-century house with Moorish cloisters and a terrace of flowerbeds hung out over the sea, which Wagner saw in 1880 and decided was the magic garden he had been trying to imagine; a concert stage is now built out over the drop and an orchestra plays on it through the summer with nothing behind them but air and water. Villa Cimbrone is the other, a twenty-minute walk away, ending in a straight avenue that arrives at a stone balustrade lined with marble busts and simply stops, eleven hundred feet above the Tyrrhenian. Greta Garbo hid here. The town itself is small, quiet and expensive, it has two good Romanesque churches, and it is the one place on this coast where the road traffic is somewhere below you rather than around you.

Piazza Duomo 1, Ravello, Campania, 84010, Italy

NO OPENING TIME HERE WAS CHECKED. The structure: both villa gardens open daily from mid-morning until about dusk, with noticeably shorter hours in winter and a last admission before closing. The cathedral opens daily and free with a long early-afternoon interval and closes for services. Piazza Duomo and the town streets never close. The Ravello Festival runs evening performances through the summer on its own published calendar. Confirm the winter garden hours in particular, which change by month.

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