Villa Cimbrone
Encyclopedia
Ravello
Ravello is a town and comune situated above the Amalfi Coast in the province of Salerno, Campania, southern Italy, with has approximately 2,500 inhabitants. It is a popular tourist destination.-History:...
, on the Amalfi coast
Amalfi Coast
-In popular culture:The Amalfi Coast is a popular destination among tourists. It was featured in "Positano," a short story written by American author John Steinbeck in 1953...
of southern Italy
Italy
Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...
, dating from at least the 11th century AD, although little of the original structure is now visible. The building was much altered and extended, using a motley collection of salvaged architectural elements from other parts of Italy and elsewhere, by Ernest William Beckett
Ernest Beckett, 2nd Baron Grimthorpe
Ernest William Beckett, 2nd Baron Grimthorpe , born Ernest William Denison, was a British banker and Conservative politician who sat in the House of Commons from 1885 until 1905 when he inherited the Grimthorpe peerage.-Biography:Beckett was the eldest son of William Beckett, younger son of Sir...
(later Lord Grimthorpe), an English politician, in the early twentieth century. The alterations were of such an extent that the building is now more pastiche than original structure. The gardens were redeveloped at the same time. The villa is now a hotel, and the gardens are open to the public.
Early history
At a later stage in its history the villa became part of the nearby monastery
Monastery
Monastery denotes the building, or complex of buildings, that houses a room reserved for prayer as well as the domestic quarters and workplace of monastics, whether monks or nuns, and whether living in community or alone .Monasteries may vary greatly in size – a small dwelling accommodating only...
of Santa Chiara, and during this period of the villa's history the papal arms of Cardinal Della Rovere were placed on the old entrance gate. From the seventeenth century the villa's history is uncertain, but by the second half of the nineteenth century the villa had passed to the Amici family of Atrani
Atrani
Atrani is a town and comune on the Amalfi Coast in the province of Salerno in the Campania region of south-western Italy. It is located on the outskirts of Amalfi, several minutes drive down the coast...
. It was visited by the historian Ferdinand Gregorovius
Ferdinand Gregorovius
Ferdinand Gregorovius was a German historian who specialized in the medieval history of Rome. He is best known for Wanderjahre in Italien, his account of the walks he took through Italy in the 1850s, and the monumental Die Geschichte der Stadt Rom im Mittelalter , a classic for Medieval and early...
, who described it thus in his Siciliana: Wanderings in Naples and Sicily (1861):
incomparable ... where the most beautiful flowers you can imagine flourished, coming from numerous plants of the South ... redesigned and enriched with countless ... ornamental features, small temples, pavilions, bronze and stone statues.
and referring to the belvedere
Belvedere (structure)
Belvedere is an architectural term adopted from Italian , which refers to any architectural structure sited to take advantage of such a view. A belvedere may be built in the upper part of a building so as to command a fine view...
(also known as the Terrazzo dell'lnfinito, the Terrace of Infinity)
While contemplating from those Armida's orchards, among the roses and the hydrangeas, that magic sea in which the blue colour of a very limpid sky is reflected, the wish of being able to fly comes out ... Right at the edge of the crag there was a terrace commanding an enchanting view; it was surrounded by horrible marble statues which, however, from afar, had a sort of appeal.
Ernest Beckett and the villa in the twentieth century
He embarked on an ambitious programme of works, including the construction of battlements, terraces and cloisters in a mixture of mock-Gothic, Moorish and Venetian architectural styles. The gardens, strung out along the cliff face, were similarly redeveloped. Grimthorpe was reputed to be the father of Violet Trefusis
Violet Trefusis
Violet Trefusis née Keppel was an English writer and socialite. She is most notable for her lesbian affair with Vita Sackville-West, which was featured under disguise in Virginia Woolf's Orlando: A Biography....
; the connection with Violet brought Vita Sackville-West
Vita Sackville-West
The Hon Victoria Mary Sackville-West, Lady Nicolson, CH , best known as Vita Sackville-West, was an English author, poet and gardener. She won the Hawthornden Prize in 1927 and 1933...
and Harold Nicolson
Harold Nicolson
Sir Harold George Nicolson KCVO CMG was an English diplomat, author, diarist and politician. He was the husband of writer Vita Sackville-West, their unusual relationship being described in their son's book, Portrait of a Marriage.-Early life:Nicolson was born in Tehran, Persia, the younger son of...
as visitors, and Vita is said to have given advice about the garden, though her own gardening ventures at Long Barn still lay some years in the future.
Beckett died in London in 1917 and his body was brought to Villa Cimbrone to be buried at the base of the Temple of Bacchus in the gardens; apt lines of Catullus
Catullus
Gaius Valerius Catullus was a Latin poet of the Republican period. His surviving works are still read widely, and continue to influence poetry and other forms of art.-Biography:...
are inscribed on the frieze:
O quid solutis est beatius curis
cum mens onus reponit, ac peregrino
labore fessi venimus larem ad nostrum,
desideratoque adquiescimus lecto?
Oh what is more blest than when the mind,
Cares dispelled, puts down its burden
And we return, tired from our travelling, to our home
To rest on the bed we have longed for?
Many famous visitors came to the villa during the Beckett family's ownership. It was a favourite haunt of the Bloomsbury Group
Bloomsbury Group
The Bloomsbury Group or Bloomsbury Set was a group of writers, intellectuals, philosophers and artists who held informal discussions in Bloomsbury throughout the 20th century. This English collective of friends and relatives lived, worked or studied near Bloomsbury in London during the first half...
, including Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf
Adeline Virginia Woolf was an English author, essayist, publisher, and writer of short stories, regarded as one of the foremost modernist literary figures of the twentieth century....
, Leonard Woolf
Leonard Woolf
Leonard Sidney Woolf was an English political theorist, author, publisher and civil servant, and husband of author Virginia Woolf.-Early life:...
, E. M. Forster
E. M. Forster
Edward Morgan Forster OM, CH was an English novelist, short story writer, essayist and librettist. He is known best for his ironic and well-plotted novels examining class difference and hypocrisy in early 20th-century British society...
, John Maynard Keynes
John Maynard Keynes
John Maynard Keynes, Baron Keynes of Tilton, CB FBA , was a British economist whose ideas have profoundly affected the theory and practice of modern macroeconomics, as well as the economic policies of governments...
, and Lytton Strachey
Lytton Strachey
Giles Lytton Strachey was a British writer and critic. He is best known for establishing a new form of biography in which psychological insight and sympathy are combined with irreverence and wit...
. Other visitors included D. H. Lawrence
D. H. Lawrence
David Herbert Richards Lawrence was an English novelist, poet, playwright, essayist, literary critic and painter who published as D. H. Lawrence. His collected works represent an extended reflection upon the dehumanising effects of modernity and industrialisation...
, Vita Sackville-West
Vita Sackville-West
The Hon Victoria Mary Sackville-West, Lady Nicolson, CH , best known as Vita Sackville-West, was an English author, poet and gardener. She won the Hawthornden Prize in 1927 and 1933...
, Edward James
Edward James
Edward William Frank James was a British poet known for his patronage of the surrealist art movement.-Early life and marriage:...
, Diana Mosley
Diana Mitford
Diana Mitford, Lady Mosley , was one of Britain's noted Mitford sisters. She was married first to Bryan Walter Guinness, heir to the barony of Moyne, and secondly to Sir Oswald Mosley, 6th Baronet, of Ancoats, leader of the British Union of Fascists; her second marriage, in 1936, took place at the...
, Henry Moore
Henry Moore
Henry Spencer Moore OM CH FBA was an English sculptor and artist. He was best known for his semi-abstract monumental bronze sculptures which are located around the world as public works of art....
, T. S. Eliot
T. S. Eliot
Thomas Stearns "T. S." Eliot OM was a playwright, literary critic, and arguably the most important English-language poet of the 20th century. Although he was born an American he moved to the United Kingdom in 1914 and was naturalised as a British subject in 1927 at age 39.The poem that made his...
, Jean Piaget
Jean Piaget
Jean Piaget was a French-speaking Swiss developmental psychologist and philosopher known for his epistemological studies with children. His theory of cognitive development and epistemological view are together called "genetic epistemology"....
, Winston Churchill
Winston Churchill
Sir Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill, was a predominantly Conservative British politician and statesman known for his leadership of the United Kingdom during the Second World War. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest wartime leaders of the century and served as Prime Minister twice...
and the Duke and Duchess of Kent. The actress Greta Garbo
Greta Garbo
Greta Garbo , born Greta Lovisa Gustafsson, was a Swedish film actress. Garbo was an international star and icon during Hollywood's silent and classic periods. Many of Garbo's films were sensational hits, and all but three were profitable...
and her then-lover, the conductor Leopold Stokowski
Leopold Stokowski
Leopold Anthony Stokowski was a British-born, naturalised American orchestral conductor, well known for his free-hand performing style that spurned the traditional baton and for obtaining a characteristically sumptuous sound from many of the great orchestras he conducted.In America, Stokowski...
, stayed at the villa several times in the late 1930s; a visit of 1938 is memorialized on a plaque.
Present-day Villa Cimbrone
The villa was sold in 1960 to the Vuilleumier family, who used it first as a private family home, and for the past few years as a hotel. In 1976 the American writer Gore VidalGore Vidal
Gore Vidal is an American author, playwright, essayist, screenwriter, and political activist. His third novel, The City and the Pillar , outraged mainstream critics as one of the first major American novels to feature unambiguous homosexuality...
(who lived in La Rondinaia, a nearby house built by Lucy Beckett, from 1972 to 2004) wrote of Villa Cimbrone:
Twenty five years ago I was asked by an American magazine what was the most beautiful place that I had ever seen in all my travels and I said the view from the belvedere of the Villa Cimbrone on a bright winter's day when the sky and the sea were each so vividly blue that it was not possible to tell one from the other.