In Bed with Gore Vidal

The home of the literary provocateur was as close to the heavens as first ladies, royals, and movie stars ever got. Now you can spend the night, channel the late author, and wake up to the most enchanted panorama on the Amalfi Coast.

- By Christopher Bollen

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. 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. 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.

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). 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. It’s as if our own ears are straining across an unspannable void for one last audience with Vidal. Instead we have only the material that writers leave in their wake: the bulk of their literary work.

But there is another way to chart this literary lion’s peripatetic rise. Like Edith Wharton and Ernest Hemingway, Vidal used his private homes as extensions of his outsize personality. They weren’t simply domestic sanctuaries but carefully engineered showrooms for myth-building and social maneuvering. “He used his home like a stage set,” says filmmaker and writer Matt Tyrnauer, Vidal’s literary executor. “And he could use it to either entertain or intimidate.”