Byline: WENDY LEIGH

Gore Vidal's love affair with Ravello started in February 1948, when he and Tennessee Williams drove there from Naples in a US Army jeep. Although the two great hopes of American literature spent only a day in the romantic town perched above the Amalfi coast, Vidal was rendered speechless by its beauty.

He was not the first to fall for Ravello - the names on the roll-call of former residents are just the type of people who would appeal to America's most patrician man of letters.

Roman aristocrats had their summer villas here, as did the only English Pope, Nicolas Breakspeare.

Richard Wagner was so beguiled he was inspired to compose Parsifal in one of the gardens. The consumptive D.H. Lawrence chose Ravello in which to complete Lady Chatterley's Lover, while John Steinbeck was unnerved by the death-defying hairpin bends on the road along the coast.

For the past 30 years, Vidal has lived in Ravello for eight months of every year. From this mountain village in southern Italy, with breathtaking views over the Gulf of Salerno, he has issued Olympian decrees on the state of the American Empire.

He wrote a string of best selling novels, from Myra Breckenridge to Burr, clashed on US television with literary heavyweight Norman Mailer and appeared in films such as Bob Roberts and Gattaca.

Gay and stately, Vidal has lent his allure to Ravello, ruling over the town from La Rondinaia, a villa perched on a precipitous cliff 1,000ft above the sea, which he and his partner, Howard Austen, bought for just [pounds sterling]172,000 in Vidal, 77, now has severe back problems, is lame and diabetic, and Austen, 73, is seriously ill, so the villa's inaccessibility makes living there impossible.

Although La Rondinaia - The Swallow's Nest - has attracted celebrated guests from Princess Margaret to Hilary Clinton, its glory days are coming to an end.

The morning I visited, a man from Sotheby's was appraising the furniture before the villa goes on the market for about [pounds sterling]9million.

It's a quarter-of-a-mile walk from Piazza Duomo - Ravello is car-free - to the villa, past the terraces of grapes, lemons and olives which step down towards the sea. Along the way, you pass Villa Cimbrone, where Diana Cooper honeymooned with her politician husband Duff, and Greta Garbo once trysted with composer Leopold Stokowski.

Later, Vidal tells me, his voice low and his Swedish accent spot-on, 'Garbo used to refer to herself as he.

Once, after she burst into tears, she said, "That was unmanly of me." And after she used the toilet, she always left the seat up.' Three locked gates guard the house - crime-ridden Naples is just the other side of the mountains - and a secluded path leads to the villa, which is set in 12 1972.

acres. Last year, long before Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's rude words about Germany in the European Parliament, the Italian government offered Vidal a king's ransom to house German chancellor Gerhardt Schroder for two weeks. Vidal indignantly refused the offer as he was there to write his next novel.

La Rondinaia is, indeed, the perfect writer's retreat. Set into the cliff so high that looking down from the balcony outside Vidal's study induces vertigo, the white villa, with flat roofs and arched windows, is built in Mediterranean style with a long, black swimming pool on the cliff's edge, one of the few additions Vidal has made to the property.

The terraces surrounding the house, offering spectacular views down to the sea, are the product of the landscape gardening of former owner Lord Grimthorpe, an Italophile who bought the land in 1905.

His daughter, Lucy Beckett, had La Rondinaia built around an iron frame in 1925. Now, after various additions, it stands four storeys high, with five bedrooms, two salons, a dining room, a service flat, all with high ceilings and Amalfi-tiled floors, creating a sensation of space and glamour.

While Austen is languishing in the service flat, Vidal is in his study, where he has written many of his 24 books. His large wooden desk once belonged to Lord Grimthorpe.

The walls are lined with framed magazine covers; Time, California Magazine (Sex, Politics and Gore) and Christopher Street, an iconic gay magazine.

There is a chess set, some of his 10,000 books, a cushion embroidered with 'No Good Deed Goes Unpunished', and photographs of Vidal with Jack Nicholson, Princess Margaret and John F. Kennedy.

Vidal lounges on a beige couch.

Under his navy sports shirt, he wears a corset, after suffering three herniated disks. His speech is slightly slurred and he says he is on painkillers to combat the pain. Nonetheless, with his leonine head, aristocratic high cheekbones and striking blue eyes, he is still a handsome man.

During their yearly stays at the villa, he would write for three hours each morning and Austen would manage the estate, along with a housekeeper and a gardener.

While both men speak fluent Italian, their days are generally spent sticking to Vidal's writing routine, broken only by house guests, and not interrupted by too much interaction with their Italian neighbours.

They were due to be flown to Los Angeles in an air ambulance two days after our meeting. After treatment, they will move back into the Los Angeles canyon house Vidal has owned for 30 years, but he isn't sentimental about selling La Rondinaia.

'I don't find it hard to say goodbye. I am not into things. What will I miss about the house? Nothing. I don't miss things. Regrets? I don't do regrets.'

It is a sentiment worthy of a man who was born blessed with looks, breeding, brains and a rapier wit and who always despised convention.

The son of Eugene Vidal and Nina Gore, he was brought up in Washington by his blind grandfather, Senator T. P. Gore.

Former American vice-president Al Gore is a distant cousin, although Vidal doesn't set much store by him, sniping, 'I do believe they are nominating the wrong Gore.' He once had serious political ambitions and made an unsuccessful stab at running for Congress in 1960.

Wisely, he chose a different path.

After a passionate homosexual affair with a soldier during the War, Vidal had his first book published when he was 19 and was soon on his way to success. He lived for a while in Guatemala, where he bought his first home, a 16th Century Baroque monastery, for $2,000. Then he moved to Rhinebeck, New York, where he lived for 20 years in an 1820s Greek Revival mansion.

In 1964, he moved to Rome, renting a penthouse on top of the 17th Century Origo Palace. Then, in 1972, Austen saw an ad for La Rondinaia, and he and Vidal moved to Ravello.

Whereas some expats make a virtue of immersing themselves in local life, such prosaic pleasures were never likely to appeal to Vidal, who has been immersed in his writing during his time there.

The rise of the American empire was the theme of his great novels and he could tell it as an insider, even connected to Jacqueline Kennedy, whose mother married his ex-stepfather, Hugh Auchincloss.

'Jackie was charming and fun,' he remembers, 'she moved into my old room at my stepfather's house, found some of my old shirts with my name tags on them and wore them for riding. She was a star, even then.

But she was selfish and self-aggrandising beyond the usual. As she lay dying, the family said she was watching herself being memorialised on television. A fitting end, said one of them, for a woman who loved publicity more than anyone else.' In spite of such stories, Vidal has given Jackie's picture pride of place in the main salon, signed, 'For Gore who makes it impossible to look this serious'. Although Jackie never visited Ravello, it would have provided a perfect setting for her.

The salon boasts an Aubusson tapestry, an 18th Century Burmese wood carving, a mosaic coffee table fashioned in Rome, a Tufa stone fireplace, tiled in yellow and green, and a 2nd Century mosaic of a horse so rare that it cannot be taken out of Italy.

The dining room is lit by an 18th Century chandelier from the Aldobrandini Palace in Rome, there is a bust of Pauline Borghese - Napoleon's sister - and ornate gold chairs used in the film, Ben Hur, which Vidal scripted.

More than his books, more than his stand against the Iraq war, Vidal is famed for his lacerating wit. When political pundit William F. Buckley called him 'a pinko queer', Vidal cracked: 'I will always treat Bill Buckley like the great lady he is.' Asked what would have happened if Khrushchev, not Kennedy, had been assassinated, he said: 'With history one can never be certain, but I think I can safely say that Aristotle Onassis would not have married Mrs Khrushchev.' Princess Margaret was a frequent visitor to La Rondinaia. 'She was too intelligent for her station in life. She had a great will for happiness, the strongest I have ever seen in anyone.

She willed herself to be content.' Hilary Clinton, her mother and daughter Chelsea visited the house.

Vidal smiles at the memory.

'As she was leaving, Hilary took my hand and said, "Meeting you was the highlight of our trip." She paused, while I thought, "I wouldn't mind becoming Secretary of State", then she went on, "Yes, the highlight of our trip - for my mother."

Rudolf Nureyev, who had an island villa nearby on the rocks of Li Galli, was also a close friend. 'He used to spend time here with us, and at the end of his life, he would describe with delight his comedown in the world.' He puts on a Russian accent, 'When I first come out of Russia, orchestra, Metropolitan, grand, Philharmonic, me, I dance. Two or three seasons later, still dance, orchestra, more cities. Finally end up Lubbock, Texas, with gramophone and one partner.' He seems to admire the dying Nureyev's equanimity in the face of decline and imminent death. Vidal himself is stoic and he doesn't indulge in any self-pity about his own waning health.

He and Austen will be buried in adjoining plots in Rock Creek Cemetery, Washington DC. But right now, there is no talk of death or dying. Next week, he will be acting in a film about Dr Alfred C. Kinsey, author of the Kinsey Report on human sexuality, and there is a new book to write.

As I leave, he says: 'The painkillers are having a bad effect on me. I'm sorry I've only had half a brain today.' I tell him not to worry. After all, Gore Vidal with half a brain is streets ahead of anyone else with a whole one.

. La Rondinaia is for sale through Glen Alpert Associates, 8899 Beverly Boulevard, Los Angeles, 90048. Fax: 001 310 788 9532

COPYRIGHT 2003 Solo Syndication Limited

This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan.  All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group.

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