No wonder Gore Vidal made his home in Ravello: from its eyrie in the mountains, you can look down on everybody.

After landing at Naples, we rented a car for what should have been an easy run, south and west, up and over the Monti Lattari (the Milk Mountains) to Ravello. Instead, we were fed into a new and elaborate road system so clever that before we knew where we were, we didn’t. The elaboration is due, in good part, to the fact that the Camorra — the Neapolitan criminal conglomerate — is big in the cement business. The fancier the new roads, especially the elevated sections, the bigger the budget, and the bungs.

The Camorra used to be more disorganised than the Mafia. It was based less on “families” and pyramidical discipline than on individual enterprise: smuggling tobacco and drugs always beats being unemployed. Crookery became epidemic, and big, big business, only after the violent earthquake of 1980. The disaster was an ill wind that blew bundles of cash southwards from Rome for “reconstruction”. As an ongoing result, enough concrete has been mixed to make ring roads around the ring roads.

When we did at last manage to wheel round and head south under sinister Vesuvius (“hackneyed”, Byron called it), we almost missed the tight turning onto the still narrow, up-and-over road that threads the mountains. You hairpin upwards under stands of chestnut trees (their bristling crop is culled, by the sackload, in ripe autumn) till you turn off to posh Ravello.

Like Taormina in Sicily — once part of the same “Kingdom of the Two Sicilies”, with its capital at Naples — Ravello has the disadvantage of its advantages. You can shun “the vulgar crowd”, as the Roman poet Horace recommended, once he had made a hit with the emperor, but at the price of being literally on the shelf: you can walk the length of the town, but it has no breadth to speak of, and not too much to see, apart from the Villa Cimbrone, with its dizzying view of the coast, and the 11th-century Villa Rufolo, with its tiered gardens, where Wagner dreamt up the meeting of Klingor and Parsifal (or so he wrote in the visitors’ book).

Ravello has long had English connections: the Cimbrone gardens were laid out by Lord Grimthorpe, whose uncle designed Big Ben’s clock. Between the wars, the Bloomsbury set had an appropriately haughty haunt up here, and in the mid-12th century, the only English pope, Hadrian IV, crowned a king of Sicily (known as William the Bad) in the modest, blanched cathedral of San Pantaleone, which has an unusual 13th-century pulpit, stilted on six marble lions. In those days, Ravello had some 30,000 inhabitants, the literally top people of the Amalfi republic.

The town is said to have been founded by a shipload of toffs on the run from the Huns in the 6th century, not long after Rome’s decline had ended in fall. When the patricians’ ship went on the rocks, they took to the hills, legend promises, to avoid mixing with the lowlife Amalfitani. Amalfi used to be a much larger place: until a great wedge of the city slid into the sea in 1343, it had an 80,000 population.

It has a neat cathedral, first built, under the lee of the cliffs, in the 9th century and made over a few times since. Norman and Arabic influences blend nicely in the quadruply-arched facade of varicoloured marble — an architectural cassata — but the ornate baroque interior is too flashy for piety. The red porphyry font is said to be from Paestum, and a head of St Andrew (the local patron saint) was lifted from Constantinople in the infamous sack of that Christian city by the crusading Doge Dandolo of Venice, in 1204. Dandolo was blind, but never to a bargain.

The greatest local source of stolen goods has been, and is, Pompeii — an easy drive away. Before archeology became an academic science, it was a blatant treasure hunt. Italy has protested recently at the number (and weight) of its art treasures lifted by thieves; anyone with knowledge of the habits of ancient Roman proconsuls can be excused a smile, because they filched a lot of the stuff in the first place. When Cicero prosecuted Verres, governor of Sicily, he told the court that his depredations had reduced the guides to showing tourists where the city’s artistic treasures used to be. Pillage makes the art go round.

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Goethe — that paramount instance of the genius as windbag — was an early visitor. “There have been many disasters in the world,” he declared, “but few that have given so much pleasure to posterity.” He could say that again, and probably did.

After Vesuvius’s catastrophic eruption in AD79, Pompeii disappeared so completely that it was only in the middle of the 18th century, when a farmer drilled a well and struck statuary, that the dilettanti began to arrive. Grand tourists, such as Horace Walpole, were lowered into the still buried ruins and crawled through the time-warped houses. Petty thieves shopped in the same way.

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