Ravello was founded in the fifth century as a place of refuge from the incursions of the barbarians that marked the fall of the Western Roman Empire , but there immigrated to the legend of the patricians Amalfi after a clash between factions of the more high- class Coast, which resulted almost in a civil war.

The town grew in population , thriving with art and with the wool trade to the Mediterranean and Byzantium and reached its heyday in the ninth century , under the Maritime Republic of Amalfi and the Principality of Salerno.
At the behest of the Norman Roger , son of Robert Guiscard , Ravello became a bishopric in 1086 placing it in contrast to the Amalfi too powerful .
At the turn of the twelfth century, the city came to have a population of over 25,000 inhabitants.
In 1135 he managed to withstand the attacks made by the Pisans to the Duchy of Amalfi, but two years later, in 1137, succumbed , was plundered and destroyed .

 RAVELLO following the devastation began its economic and demographic decline : from the fourteenth century, many of its inhabitants moved to Naples and environs in 1400 even though the patricians were still very active Ravello : an example was the Rufolo , bankers of the Kingdom of Naples , then powerful (see Ladislaus of Durazzo, King of Naples ) , and was the heavy tax system inefficient Spanish government that determined the decline, lasted until the end of the eighteenth century.
Since the nineteenth century , rediscovered by artists and intellectuals , regained its importance as a place of tourism culturally elitist.
 
Source: Wikipedia