History

The Rufolo family were among the most powerful merchants of medieval southern Italy, with trading connections extending to the Levant, Sicily, Tunisia and the Angevin court in Naples. At the peak of their wealth in the 13th and 14th centuries, they built a complex of towers and ceremonial halls on the promontory above Ravello that reflected this cosmopolitan background: the square Norman tower mixed with Moorish arcading and a Gothic cloister-courtyard in the manner of Frederick II’s Sicilian-Arab-Norman hybrid tradition. The family declined in the late 14th century and the complex gradually fell to ruin, though the towers survived.

The Scottish botanist Francis Neville Reid purchased the property in 1851 and undertook a romantic restoration: he cleared the undergrowth, terraced the slopes, planted exotic species brought back from his botanical travels, and opened the gardens to visitors. It was Reid’s restored garden that Wagner visited in 1880. The composer was staying in Ravello while working on the second act of Parsifal — the opera’s central scene takes place in the enchanted garden of the sorcerer Klingsor — and the combination of the terraced heights, the Arab-Norman ruins, and the exotic plantings convinced him he had found the physical prototype of his imagined garden. He wrote “den Zaubergarten des Klingsor hab ich gefunden” in the villa’s guestbook. Wagner died three years later, in 1883, without returning to Ravello; but his note launched a cultural association between Ravello and romantic musical Wagnerism that has never ended.