Culture - Music Festival - The current Ravello Festival is the oldest of the Italian festivals after the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino. Girolamo Bottiglieri and Paolo Caruso devised the idea for the cultural event which has contributed towards Ravello's status as a "Città della musica". Wagner's association with the Villa Rufolo made it a tempting venue for staging concerts. In the 1935 the orchestra of the San Carlo Theatre in Naples performed a Wagnerian programme. One concert was attended by the Princes of Piedmont. Paolo Caruso re-proposed the idea some twenty years later, adding the daring suggestion of a stand suspended over the sea. The plans were realised thanks to the commitment of the Provincial Board of Tourism.

Accommodations - Hotel Caruso - One Hundred Years of History - In year 1893, Pantaleone Caruso, (who already owned a vineyard and produced an excellent wine), and his wife, Emilia Cicalese, rented 5 rooms in one of the wings of the Marquis D’Afflitto’s eleventh century palace and open the "Pensione Belvedere". He chose this name because of the hanging garden facing the mountains and plunging down to the sea. Getting there was not an easy thing, but the efforts of the first daring tourists were paid off by the splendid view: blooming lemon groves and lush vineyards stippled by white roofs against the blue of the sea and of the sky. The guests were simply fascinated: glorious food, glorious home made wine and glorious view. The Hotel served as a favourite haunt of the Bloomsbury Group, Virginia Woolf and Lord Keynes among others, and it also helped Graham Green and William Styron to find the way, respectively, to The Third Man and Set This House On Fire. Last but not least to fall to Ravello’s charms is Gore Vidal who, brought to Ravello for the first time by Tennessee Williams, wrote, while staying at room n° 9, his Myra Breckinridge. He will leave Ravello no more, becoming a freeman of this corner of paradise.