(In the most coveted months, the cost is roughly $13,000 a night, or $90,000 a week, via the agency In Villas Veritas, says founder Laura Blair.) A consortium of Italian businessmen purchased the home as a tourist sector investment in 2006, and for nearly a decade there were constant rumors of the house reopening as a boutique hotel. This summer will be the first full season introducing La Rondinaia to the market of private rentals. I visited Ravello recently to spend a night in the house in hopes of summoning a ghost. Play icon The triangle icon that indicates to play “And he could use it to either entertain or intimidate.” “He used his home like a stage set,” says filmmaker and writer Matt Tyrnauer, Vidal’s literary executor. They weren’t simply domestic sanctuaries but carefully engineered showrooms for myth building and social maneuvering. Like Edith Wharton and Ernest Hemingway, Vidal used his private homes as extensions of his outsize personality. Instead we have only the material that writers leave in their wake: the bulk of their literary work.īut there is another way to chart this literary lion’s peripatetic rise. It’s as if our own ears are straining across an unspannable void for one last audience with Vidal. Since his death in 2012, I can’t count the number of times I’ve heard friends wish that the patrician sage were alive to shed light on the wild turns of the past decade. No doubt Vidal would have preferred to be remembered as the most astute diagnostician of the illnesses plaguing the American Empire (or the United States of Amnesia, as he liked to call his homeland). There are many ways the guide could have described the maestro hibernating inside La Rondinaia, his chalk-white abode in Ravello: fiction writer, celebrity intellectual, acid-tongued wit, pro-promiscuity gay icon, occasional talk show brawler, Hollywood screenwriter, collector of bold-faced friends.
He could hear the tour guide announce his name with her microphone, pointing out the house to sightseers, but to his chagrin he couldn’t decipher what they were saying about him. Gore Vidal used to gripe that every morning a tourist boat would pass below his cliff-hugging villa on the turquoise waters of the Gulf of Salerno-a vertiginous one thousand feet below, to be exact.
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