Ravello, Italy

The best views of the coast can be had inland, high above Amalfi in RAVELLO: another renowned spot "closer to the sky than the seashore", wrote André Gide – with some justification. Ravello was also an independent republic for a while, and for a time an outpost of the Amalfi city-state. Now it's not much more than a large village, but its unrivalled location, spread across the top of one of the coast's mountains, makes it more than worth the thirty-minute bus ride through the steeply cultivated terraces up from Amalfi – although, like most of this coast, the charms of Ravello haven't been recently discovered. Wagner set part of Parsifal, one of his last operas, in the place; D.H. Lawrence wrote some of Lady Chatterley's Lover here; John Huston filmed his languid movie Beat the Devil in town; and more recently the writer and political polemicist Gore Vidal lived here for many years.