Ravello

The bus from Amalfi climbs a switchback road so steep and narrow that you press yourself against the window as oncoming vehicles pass within inches, and then suddenly it stops in a small piazza and a woman says something in dialect and everyone gets off, and you are in Ravello. The air is different up here — cooler, lighter, faintly resinous from the umbrella pines. Below you, barely visible through the trees, the sea glints three hundred meters down. The town is spread along a ridge, and everything about it — the pace of people walking, the sound levels, the way shopkeepers don’t seem to urgently want your business — operates at a frequency removed from the frenzy of the coastal towns.

Ravello is famous for two things: its music festival and its gardens. The Ravello Festival runs through the summer in the open-air auditorium of Villa Rufolo, and the setting is absurd — an orchestra beneath the stars with the black Tyrrhenian below and the lit villages of the coast scattered along the clifftops like fallen stars. Wagner came here in 1880, looked at the garden at Villa Rufolo, and decided he’d found the inspiration for the garden of Klingsor in Parsifal. There’s a plaque. I stood at it in the early morning when the garden was empty and tried to understand what he saw, and I think I got some of it.

But it’s Villa Cimbrone that breaks you. The gardens stretch along the ridge, a long walk through rose gardens and classical statuary and shaded pergolas draped in wisteria, until you arrive at the Terrazza dell’Infinito — the Terrace of Infinity — a balustrade lined with marble busts at the absolute edge of the ridge. Below is three hundred meters of air and then the sea, stretching south toward Africa. The busts look out toward the horizon with expressions that seem appropriate: serene, slightly dazed. I stood there for twenty minutes. The sea changed color four times. A French couple behind me went completely quiet.

Ravello town itself rewards slow exploration. The cathedral of Santa Maria Assunta has a bronze door from 1179 and an interior that smells of candles and old stone, a certain particular silence that feels earned. The piazza outside it in the evening — tables out, a carafe of the local white wine which has a mineral quality the coastal towns never quite match, old men playing cards in the corner — is one of the more civilized scenes on this coast. Ravello doesn’t have a beach. It doesn’t need one. It has altitude and gardens and a view that makes everything else feel like it’s operating at the wrong level.

When to go: Spring and autumn, unambiguously. May brings the roses at Villa Cimbrone to full bloom and the air is soft. July and August see the festival in full swing, which is wonderful if you book ahead — the concerts are extraordinary — but prices spike and the town fills. October is ideal: the gardens thin out, the light turns amber, and you can have the Terrazza dell’Infinito to yourself on a weekday morning. In winter Ravello goes quiet to the point of near-abandonment, which has its own austere appeal.