Novelist Christopher Bollen’s Dispatch from Gore Vidal’s Salon on the Almafi Coast

Savas Abadsidis June 8, 2022

Novelist Christopher Bollen calls his travel story on writer Gore Vidal’s Ravello Home, La Rondinaia for Town and Country, a dream assignment.

Vidal died in 2012 but I’m not the only one who often laments his loss before our current age and what his singular wit and analysis would make of it.

Then again, perhaps it’s best he didn’t live to see it.

Photo by Mahdiye JV on Unsplash

Bollen (below) writes: “The Italian home of the literary provocateur was as close to the heavens as first ladies, royals, and movie stars ever got. Now you can rent the villa, channel the late author, and wake up to the most enchanted panorama on the Amalfi Coast.”

Town and Country:

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.”
“The house was mythic, and Gore was mythic,” Tyrnauer says. “La Rondinaia would become a big part of his public persona.” He’s right. Many interviews with the novelist were held on his balcony. Vidal used to say that he liked living in Italy because it was the best place to watch the end of the world. It also happened to be a dramatic backdrop for that dying world to watch him.