Golden Book

Wagner arrived in Ravello with his stage designer, the painter Joukovsky in search for inspiration and found his Parsifal’s Klingsor garden in Villa Rufolo’s enchanted one.

Edvard Grieg found the Muse for the most suggestive sceneries of Peer Gynt  in the woods, gardens and mysterious caves of Ravello. The musical vocation of the place is also confirmed by the repeated sojourns of Bruno Walter and Leonard Bernstein, but in Ravello the most powerful Muse remains Calliope, the writers’ muse.

Greta Garbo fell in love with Ravello because it gave her the freedom to be herself: beautiful, charming but otherwise an ordinary woman. That is, until somebody whispered there was a star in the village hiding between Hotel Caruso and Villa Cimbrone.

The press whipped up a frenzy and from that day on every woman wearing a pair of sunglasses had to be the elusive Garbo. The hunting season was open, only a week after her arrival in 1938. It was easy then for her friend Nina Caruso, the owner of the Hotel Caruso, to fool the paparazzi and take them all on a wild goose chase, while Ms Garbo relaxed in peace.

As she had told Nina many times during their teas, she was longing to become Leopold Stokowski’s wife and to be happily forgotten. 

That was the effect of Ravello, of its peaceful, timeless atmosphere. 

1926 –  Umberto II di Savoia – King of Italy, Anne de France, Filippo d’Assia
1929 – King Farouk, Arturo Toscanini
1930 – Greta Garbo, Leopold Stokowski
1931 – Hungarian Royal Family
1932 – Max Reinhart
1935  – Toti Dal Monte – soprano
1936 – Eduardo De Filippo – Neapolitan playwriter
1938 – Rosalind Russell, Alexander Fleming (Nobel for penicillin), Margot Fonteyn (ballet dancer) 

1951 - Totò De Curtis
1953 - John Huston, Gina Lollobrigida, Humphrey Bogart, Peter Lorre, Ivor Barnard,    Marco Tulli
1962 -  Jacqueline Kennedy
1978 - Ligabue, Eduardo De Filippo, Ronald Regan 
1988 - Luca Goldoni, James Donnelly, Gerardo Sacco, Gore Vidal, Fausto Cigliano
1989 -  Giorgio Albertazzi, Piera degli Esposti, Claudia Cardinale
1990 -  Nantas Salvalaggio

1991 – Roberto Gervaso, Gianni Brera, Maria Gabriela di Savoia, Honorable Giulio Andreotti, Peter O’ Toole
1993 – Dustin Hoffman
1994 – Wim Wenders
1995 – Diane Keaton