Venue R3

Not so much a hotel as an exclusive private villa that offers accommodation (just 20 rooms) to “most particular" guests, of whom - if not the most celebrated, the most “emblematic - was film actress Greta Garbo, the quintessential woman - or “diva divina," as one guest wrote of her.

A plaque on the wall records the Swedish vamp’s famously romantic (“I want to be alone") assignation in the hotel (in 1938) with the conductor, Leopold Stokowski.

D.H. Lawrence,, among many other luminaries, also stayed for a while to “commune with my heart," as he wrote in a verse carved in stone in one of the garden grottoes. He also wrote much of Lady Chatterley’s Lover in the Villa.

Yet another eminent literary guest was Virginia Woolf, who brought most of her Bloomsbury Set of (her word) “abstract-talking" aesthetes to stay for a summer salon, including her sometime lover, Vita Sackville-West, believed to have helped plan the most beautiful - some say “eccentric" – formal gardens* in Ravello.

*(They were sketched at one time, incidentally, by a portly British political figure with a huge sun-hat on his head & fat cigar in his mouth. Unmistakably, of course, Sir Winston Churchill.)

Originally an 11th Century patrician villa, the Villa was acquired at the turn of the 20th Century by a Northern English industrialist & “certified" eccentric, Lord Grimthorpe, who spent his fortune on restoring the old palace & surrounds.

With the assistance of a local lady designer of much talent & patience, he created a neo-classical, Victorian “folly" of a landscaped, sculpted, actually remarkably harmonious set of gardens.

A mini-temple is dedicated to Bacchus, the God of Revels, and a sunken grotto to Eve, the original temptress. (An intriguing thought is of the great sculptor Henry Moore strolling around the romantic statuary).

His Lordship’s most impressive bequest to the Villa, however, is a wisteria-arcaded “Alley of Immensity" leading to a “Belvedere of Infinity".

“Awesome" words, of course, but “beautiful overlook" is precisely right. Precisely 1,198 feet (365 m.) above the highest cliff overhang in Ravello, looking out over an infinite blue-blue sea & sky. Or it is for anyone whose imagination transcends the actual end-point of the view of a misty blue-grey (sometimes invisible) range of mountains along the Cilento Coast on the southern arc of the Gulf of Salerno.

Augustan Roman busts line the parapet of the belvedere as incidental props for the classical Villa wedding photographs. It’s also the fore-gathering place for welcoming cocktails as the bridal couple & guests arrive.

The reception itself is custom-made to order by the principal guests, held either in the gardens or the villa’s vaulted crypt. Either way, service & attention to detail are reliably impeccable...

As might be expected, given that the Vuillemier family owners & staff are long practiced in the art (& science) of hosting every bride’s “special day."

Invariably the Villa event is distinctive, personalised & assuredly memorable.