Ravello was an important city of the maritime Republic of Amalfi, an
important commercial center in the Mediterranean between
839 and 1200. Ravello was also a diocese from 1086 to
1603, then the bishop was moved in Scala.
Dominating the sea from more than 300 meters height, from
the top of the valley of the dragons, this place became the destination
of many tourists and the seat of the "Ravello festival" each year in
summer (created in 1953 in the honor of Richard Wagner). The beauty of
this village-garden, inspired from immemorials times freedom to its
inhabitants, visitors, travellers, intellectuals and artists of all
nationalities like Boccaccio or Wagner.
Ravello was in the beginning a vacation resort of the Roman
patriarchs, and like Amalfi, the city known its greater splendour
between the X and the XIIIth century thanks to an intense maritime
trade and with the production of fabrics (wool and cotton). Its decline
started with the Norman ones of Roger II, but intensified especially
with the invasion of Pisans in 1337 which withdrew at all the Coast its
political and economic independence
Ravello contains merries like the Cimbrone Villa, built around the XIth
century, and clearing at the beginning of the XXth by an English
gentleman, Lord Grimthorpe, with the assistance of Nicola Mansi. The
garden of Cimbrone is still today a rare example of grace and joke. The
family Rufolo, the richest of Ravello, built in the 13th century the
villa of the same name on a rock projection whose point remains still
today in the memories of thousands of visitors. Nicola Rufolo, a member
of this family, founded the pulpit of the cathedral in 1272:
masterpieces of mosaic arabo-Byzantine.
Dominating the sea from more than 300 meters height, from
the top of the valley of the dragons, this place became the destination
of many tourists and the seat of the "Ravello festival" each year in
summer (created in 1953 in the honor of Richard Wagner). The beauty of
this village-garden, inspired from immemorials times freedom to its
inhabitants, visitors, travellers, intellectuals and artists of all
nationalities like Boccaccio or Wagner. 
Ravello was in the beginning a vacation resort of the Roman
patriarchs, and like Amalfi, the city known its greater splendour
between the X and the XIIIth century thanks to an intense maritime
trade and with the production of fabrics (wool and cotton). Its decline
started with the Norman ones of Roger II, but intensified especially
with the invasion of Pisans in 1337 which withdrew at all the Coast its
political and economic independence 