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The rock
The villa takes its name from a rocky outcrop
Villa Cimbrone stands on a rocky outcrop known as Cimbronium, which gave it its name. Its earliest references date to the 11th century, when it belonged to the noble Accongiogioco family. It later became part of the nearby monastery of Santa Chiara.
Mr Beckett
Ernest Beckett bought it in 1904 and rebuilt it with a local tailor
Ernest Beckett, later Lord Grimthorpe, bought the villa from the Amici family in 1904. He enlisted Nicola Mansi, a tailor-barber-builder from Ravello he had met in England, to restore and enlarge it, adding battlements, terraces and a cloister in mock-Gothic, Moorish and Venetian styles.
The guests
The Bloomsbury Group and Greta Garbo stayed here
The villa was a favourite haunt of the Bloomsbury Group, including Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster and John Maynard Keynes. Greta Garbo and the conductor Leopold Stokowski stayed several times in the late 1930s, and a visit of 1938 is memorialized on a plaque.
The terrace
The Terrace of Infinity was a film set and Gore Vidal's favourite view
The villa is known for its belvedere, the Terrazza dell'Infinito. The 1953 John Huston film Beat the Devil shot an extended scene of Humphrey Bogart and Jennifer Jones there. The writer Gore Vidal, who lived nearby from 1972 to 2004, wrote about the view in 1976.
“...the view from the belvedere of the Villa Cimbrone on a bright winter's day when the sky and the sea were each so vividly blue that it was not possible to tell one from the other”
Gore Vidal, writing in 1976
The grave
Beckett died in London and was buried in the garden
Ernest Beckett died in London in 1917. His body was brought to Villa Cimbrone and buried at the base of the Temple of Bacchus in the gardens, with lines of Catullus inscribed on the frieze.
Day 4, afternoon
It comes after Villa Rufolo. Then Terrace of Infinity.
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The words are a retelling of the Wikipedia article Villa Cimbrone, and are shared under CC BY-SA 4.0. They are checked against those articles, and a fact that is not in them is left out.