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"View Slideshow\n\nWhen asked why he lived in Rome, his home for more than three decades, Gore Vidal used to offer a typically lapidary response: \"What better place to wait for the end of the world than in a city that calls itself eternal?\" So it came as something of a shock last spring when Vidal decided to stop waiting for the end and take up immediate occupancy in Eden. He gave up his penthouse apartment overlooking the ruins in Largo Argentina (See Architectural Digest, October 1985) and settled full-time into his sumptuous villa in Ravello overlooking the Amalfi Coast.\n\nThe reasons for Gore Vidal's move are as varied as the man himself. By turns an intellectual and entertainer, a novelist and polemicist, a sober historian and wicked humorist, a screenwriter and now an actor, he naturally gravitated to a place where his need for silence and solitude could be brought into balance with his social and professional life. \"Rome became intolerable,\" Vidal explains. \"I couldn't take the air. It was affecting my vision. Up here on the hill in Ravello my eyes cleared.\"\n\nThe moment one sets foot on Vidal's estate one feels its tonic effect. Hewn out of a mountainside a thousand feet above the Mediterranean, the eight acres of terraced land present staggering views of sea and sky, of tiny coastal towns and toylike dwellings painted in pastel hues that change with every passing hour. The whitewashed villa clings to a craggy cliffface, as if to defy gravity and graphically account for its name\u2014La Rondinaia, The Swallow's Nest. The air is pure and scented with rosemary, thyme, and wildflowers; the quiet is rarely broken by anything louder than birdsong.\n\nVidal had visited Ravello decades before he considered buying a house there. Back in 1948 he and Tennessee Williams came careening along the Amalfi Coast in a secondhand army jeep. Williams, who lamented, \"I am for all intents and purposes blind in one eye,\" was at the wheel, and as Vidal recalls the trip, \"Between Tennessee's driving and the beauty of the area, I had a mixed first impression.\"\n\nBut in 1972, when he first walked onto the property, his response was immediate and clear-cut. Even before Vidal saw the house, even while he was still walking down the long cypress all\u00E9e leading from the front gate, \"I said to myself, I'm going to buy this place.\"\n\nOnce he reached La Rondinaia, Vidal liked the fact that it followed a classical Roman floor plan, with a series of rooms opening off long halls. At the same time, it had many of the hallmarks of the local Mediterranean style\u2014barrel-vaulted ceilings that keep the house cool in summer, colorful tile patterns on the floor and on the massive tufa mantelpieces, and arched windows and doorways with ornate grillwork. Initially Vidal made few structural changes and did little more than re-cover the furniture that came with the house. Bill Willis, who has lived and worked for many years in Marrakesh, decorated the living room with Moroccan rugs and a low table whose mosaic surface gleamed in imitation of the ceramic pulpit of Ravello's Duomo.\n\nNow that La Rondinaia has become Vidal's permanent residence, however, the clean lines and spare furnishings of a country retreat have been fleshed out by the accumulated belongings of a rich and complicated life. From the apartment in Rome he brought thousands of books and dozens of paintings and pieces of memorabilia. If all these disparate elements haven't yet been complete integrated, their presence nonetheless pleases Vidal, who explains that one reason for the move was to gather his things together under one roof where he could enjoy them.\n\nAs an example, he points to an early Aubusson tapestry that depicts several Dutchmen slaying a wolf. \"It's rather crude,\" he says, \"but I always liked it. And now that it's in the small salon here, it brings together Rome and Ravello, uniting styles and houses. Everything is here. As you can see,\" he adds in the arch tones of a veteran talk-show guest who has held his own with generations of interviewers, \"my wants are simple.\"\n\nThe satisfaction of these \"simple wants,\" it should be emphasized, required many years of hard work and meticulous planning by Vidal and Howard Austen, his longtime companion. When asked if Ravello has inspired his writing, Vidal wisecracks, \"In the early days I'd be inspired to take on a movie to get the pool finished. That's a powerful inspiration. I always date things by which book, which money, built it.\"\n\nThus he knows that the pool, the poolhouse, and the sauna were finished in 1984, coinciding with the publication of his novel Lincoln. And in a sense the completion of the pool was the beginning of the process of leaving Rome, for Vidal found that he loved sitting beside the water reading all morning, then swimming before lunch, then returning at sundown to watch the swallows sweep out of the evening sky to drink from the pool.\n\n\u00A0Vidal also took increasing delight in his property, with its olive and chestnut trees; its groves of lemons and figs; its arbors of grapes, wisteria, and bougainvillea; and its long all\u00E9es of enormous cypresses. The original owner of the land, Lord Grimthorpe, was an amateur botanist who traveled the globe searching for plants that would flourish in the area. Vidal and Austen have continued the tradition, putting two and a half acres under cultivation with different species.\u00A0 Austen happily enumerates the names of the flowers, shrubs and grasses he's planted in recent years\u2014gaillardia, dianthus, fuchsia, agapanthus, iris, and tritoma.\n\nWhile Austen oversaw the installation of an irrigation system\u2014\"the first in the area,\" he claims\u2014Vidal has restricted himself for the most part to the sort of work he does best. \"I walk in the garden. I think. Or think I'm thinking.\" At the moment he's focusing on his memoirs\u2014or \"my Me-Mores,\" as he pronounces the word, with characteristic self-deprecation. \"They're entitled Palimpsest\u2014a word nobody will know. But then it's a life nobody will know, particularly after reading the book. I just skip around to things that interest me.\" When pressed, Vidal concedes that his autobiography, which he's long resisted writing, is partially an attempt to set the record straight. Over the years, he says, he has grown weary of reading about himself in other memoirs and \"finding a stranger masquerading with my name.\"\n\nAs Vidal eases into the task of writing about the people and experiences that have shaped his life, the villa has been renovated with an eye to comfort and efficiency. Recently repainted, the house has been fitted with double-pane windows to keep out the winter chill and with screens to thwart the summer mosquitoes. The gymnasium next to Vidal's bedroom has been transformed into a library, and the porch has been glassed in to provide a toasty spot where Vidal can sit and read on cool days. The porch, like many of the rooms, is hung with art that Vidal describes as eclectic. \"As Honorary Citizen of Ravello, I have to open every flower show, every art show. Often I have to buy a picture. So I have a lot of wacky-looking pictures. My favorite modern painter is Magritte, and a lot of these people are painting Magritte pictures . . .\u00A0 very, very funny ones that were done in all seriousness.\"\n\nNow that his studio has been made over into something resembling a full-service facility,\u00A0 Vidal need never leave La Rondinaia. There's a satellite dish so that he can keep up with events in the U.S. via CNN, and there's a fax machine for sending off reviews and essays.\n\nIn addition to his books and videocassettes, Vidal has a rogue's gallery of photographs of the famous and infamous to amuse him. \"I sort of put out a different photo every month,\" he says\u2014some to remind him of family and friends, and some, he confesses, \"for sardonic reasons.\" There's a signed picture of Amelia Earhart. \"She was a friend of my father's. I was very fond of her.\" Then there's a snapshot of Charlton Heston in costume on the set of Ben-Hur,a film Vidal helped write. According to Vidal, Paul Newman was offered the starring role but refused, because after The Silver Chalice, \"He would never work in a cocktail dress again.\"\n\nDespite his claims to the contrary, there is little evidence that Vidal has turned into a recluse. He welcomes old friends from Rome, as well as from London, Paris, New York, and Los Angeles. What's more, he continues to travel, lecturing at universities, promoting his books, commenting on political and cultural events, and, in recent years, performing in films. Referring to his acting as \"an occupation for the sunset years,\" Vidal takes pains\u2014humorous pains\u2014to stress that his role as an aging liberal senator in Bob Roberts wasn't his screen debut. More than 20 years ago he made a cameo appearance in Federico Fellini's Roma, and long before that, at the age of ten, he was featured in a Path\u00E9 newsreel that showed him in an airplane with his father, Eugene Vidal, in the copilot's seat.\n\nMore recently, Vidal worked with actor Joe Pesci in a new movie, With Honors, and he demonstrates every sign of being ready whenever another good script happens to come his way. Part of his willingness to go off on location is his knowledge that he has La Rondinaia to return to. \"When I'm away, I think about Ravello all the time. Knowing I can come back here makes the road bearable.\"\n\nWhen someone suggests that the old adage is right, living well is the best revenge,\u00A0 Vidal promptly responds, \"That's absurd. Why choose between the perfection of the life and the perfection of the work? Why not both?\"\n\nClick here to view the slide show of Gore Vidal's Ravello villa."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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