The best views of the coast can be had inland from Amalfi in RAVELLO : another renowned spot, "closer to the sky than the seashore", wrote André Gide - with some justification. Ravello was also an independent republic for a while, and for a time an outpost of the Amalfi city-state; now it's not much more than a large village, but its unrivalled location, spread across the top of one of the coast's mountains, 335m up, makes it more than worth the thirty-minute bus ride up from Amalfi - although, like most of this coast, the charms of Ravello haven't been recently discovered. Wagner based part of Parsifal , one of his last operas, on the place; D.H. Lawrence wrote some of Lady Chatterley's Lover here; John Huston filmed his languid movie Beat the Devil in town (a film in which the locations easily outshine the plot); and Gore Vidal is just one of the best known of many celebrities who spend at least part of the year here.