In 1880 Richard Wagner came up to Ravello, walked into the garden of Villa Rufolo and recognised there the magic garden of Klingsor, the setting of the second act of Parsifal, which he was then writing. That single afternoon began a century of music: Wagnerian concerts as early as the thirties, often with the orchestra of the Teatro di San Carlo in Naples; then, in 1953, seventy years after the composer's death, the «Wagnerian Concerts in the Gardens of Klingsor» promoted by Girolamo Bottiglieri and Paolo Caruso; and since 2003 the Ravello Festival, run by the Fondazione Ravello. The house is far older: the layout dates from the 13th century and belonged to the Rufolo, merchants wealthy enough for Boccaccio to make a Landolfo Rufolo the hero of one of the tales in the Decameron; the Confalone, Muscettola and d'Afflitto families followed.
What to see
The finest piece is the cloister, whose double order of columns and Arab-Sicilian carving make the Arab-Norman manner of the whole complex legible. You enter through a pointed archway in the entrance tower, which holds four statues representing Charity and Hospitality; the main building still has its barrel-vaulted chapel. Everything else is dominated by the Torre Maggiore, about thirty metres high, for centuries the measure of Rufolo wealth: since 2017, after a demanding restoration, it has housed a vertical museum, and some 100 steps up there is a viewpoint over the old centre of Ravello and the coast.
The gardens occupy two terraces that drop straight towards the Gulf of Salerno and are in flower for most of the year; the lower one is the stage of the Ravello Festival, with the orchestra set on a platform that hangs over the void. The present arrangement is not medieval but nineteenth-century: around the middle of that century the villa was bought by the Scotsman Francis Neville Reid, a connoisseur of art and botany, who restored it from top to bottom and gave it the shape it has today. After his death it was split among his heirs, then bought back in 1974 by the provincial tourist board of Salerno, which ran it until 2007; the Fondazione Ravello looks after it now. The upper halls, also restored, open onto the gardens and host exhibitions.
Visiting
The entrance is on Piazza del Vescovado, facing the cathedral: you can only arrive on foot, since central Ravello is closed to cars, which stay in the car parks at the edge of the village; buses come up from Amalfi and Atrani along the hairpins of the Dragone valley. Tickets are sold at the gate, under the tower. Three quarters of an hour covers the full route, cloister, tower, upper halls and both gardens, or a good hour if you stop at the belvedere; on summer evenings access to the lower garden depends on the concert programme.
Our editors' tip
Go in the late afternoon, when the coaches have left and the light comes in sideways across the gulf: that is the moment when the lower terrace explains by itself why Wagner thought of Klingsor's garden. If you are here in summer, check the festival programme before booking a hotel: hearing an orchestra on a platform suspended above the sea, with the Gulf of Salerno behind the players, does not happen anywhere else. And climb the Torre Maggiore anyway: from the top the cathedral bell tower stands almost at eye level.
