Gore Vidal, who died at his home in the Hollywood Hills on Tuesday at 86, was always perturbed when the press referred to him as an expatriate. Vidal spent most of every year, starting in the early 1960s, in Rome, and later between Rome and a grand villa, La Rondinaia (the swallow’s nest), in the Amalfi Coast village of Ravello. He preferred to think of his position in Southern Italy as a perch from which to observe his country. I think the scores of novels, essays, and plays he wrote about the United States prove that the distance gave him great perspective on what he variously referred to as the United States of Amnesia and “my only subject.” Federico Fellini, whom Vidal befriended in Rome—Vidal appeared as himself in Roma and wrote a draft of Fellini’s Casanova—said that Gorino, as Fellini called him, had “gone native” in Italy. Vidal rejected that pronouncement as well, and, indeed, his grasp of the Italian language was always rudimentary at best, in keeping with the much-preferred role of American Icon Abroad, which he played in the manner of the movie stars who frolicked together on the Via Veneto at the time of La Dolce Vita. (I imagine he thought of himself as possessing the star power of an Elizabeth Taylor trapped in the body of a Burt Lancaster.)

Vidal settled in Rome in order to be able to work at the library of the American Academy, where he researched Julian (1964), his return to the novel, after years of writing for Broadway, television, and movies and an unsuccessful run for Congress, in 1960, from a district in Dutchess County, New York. His novel-writing career had been torpedoed by the New York Times book critic Orville Prescott, who refused to review—or even read, he told Vidal’s editor at E. P. Dutton—any of Vidal’s books following The City and the Pillar (1948), one of the first works of fiction in the English language with an explicitly homosexual theme. Rome was, in a sense, the reset button for Vidal’s career. He was celebrated for Broadway hits (Visit to a Small Planet and The Best Man), and he had made a small fortune writing for movies (Suddenly Last Summer, Ben Hur) and TV, but he was confident that he was a novelist above all. Julian, a huge best-seller, proved him right. His next book, written in Rome, was Washington, D.C. (1967), the first of what would become the immensely popular Narratives of Empire, his seven-volume American historical series, written over 33 years.

The period when Vidal relocated and retrenched in Italy was a rather inhospitable time for him in New York and, even more so, in Washington. Truman Capote and Norman Mailer, who, along with Vidal, constituted New York’s postwar literary triumvirate, were his sworn enemies at the time, Capote having become a sort of chamberlain to the court of the Upper East Side, and Mailer the king of bohemians in Brooklyn Heights. That made every downtown salon and Park Avenue drawing room dangerous ground for Vidal. (His epic televised brawl with William F. Buckley Jr. came later, in 1968, on ABC’s coverage of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. He would hold Capote and Buckley in perpetual disdain, and he did killing impressions of both of them. He and Mailer, with whom he famously butted heads on a 1971 Dick Cavett broadcast, eventually made peace.)

In November 1961, there had been an incident at the White House at a dinner party the Kennedys gave in honor of Gianni and Marella Agnelli. Vidal and Bobby Kennedy had words after Vidal inadvertently placed his hand on the bare shoulder of the First Lady. (Vidal and Jackie Kennedy shared a stepfather, Hugh D. Auchincloss.) Vidal wrote in his 1995 memoir, Palimpsest, that R.F.K. tried to provoke him in the passage between the Blue Room and the Red Room, calling Vidal “‘buddy boy,’ an expression I had never heard used outside a thirties movie.” Vidal returned the provocation, accusing R.F.K. of abusing his power as attorney general and overseer of the F.B.I. “He said it was none of my business. I said I could make it, or anything else, my business in the most public way,” Vidal wrote. “You? A writer? He was scornful. Kennedys bought writers. I was now cooling off. Later, he would say that I had said, ‘I’ll get you.’ But macho as our chat was, I was not into thirties dialogue, even though my political role model, Eleanor Roosevelt, sometimes was. Now myself again, I summed up, ‘Writers, since they have so many words, often have the last one.’” Vidal left the party in anger, escorted by Arthur Schlesinger Jr., John Kenneth Galbraith, and George Plimpton. Capote helped broadcast the word that Vidal had been drunk and given offense. (Vidal later sued Capote for libel for spreading the story and settled for a signed statement from Capote, admitting that he had knowingly lied.) Vidal concluded in Palimpsest: “The squalor never ends once one gets involved with people for whom truth is no criterion. I should have known better. I stayed among them too long. I had now lit out for another country, in every sense. Life changed.”

It was that very changed life that I saw, many years later, when I got to know Vidal (at first, as his editor at this magazine) and visited him often in Italy, always in Ravello, where he held court at La Rondinaia and, it is fair to say, presided over the medieval village he had made his part-time home since the early 1970s. When he emerged from his gated compound (one kilometer from the town piazza, reachable only on foot after a walk along garden paths), the townspeople and tourists along his route either parted in awe or bowed in obsequiousness. The locals greeted him, unfailingly, with “Buongiorno, Maestro!” Vidal responded with an appropriately magisterial bow of the head. Christopher Hitchens, who observed this routine in the years before his falling out with Vidal over what the latter called the Cheney-Bush oil-and-gas junta, would affectionately refer to Vidal as “the Pope of Ravello.” Among the beguiling contradictions of Vidalian life: the actual Bishop of Ravello was a frequent guest at La Rondinaia, despite the atheistic stance of the padrone.

Most days, after stopping writing around four o’clock, Vidal would join Howard Austen at a café in the piazza. (Austen, Vidal’s companion of 53 years, died in 2003; Vidal will be buried next to him in their plot at Rock Creek Cemetery, in Washington, D.C.) The Bar Klingsor maintained a shrine to Vidal over the front door, featuring photos of Ravello’s honorary citizen with celebrities who had made the pilgrimage to visit him. Among the long line of dignitaries Vidal and Austen received were Hillary Clinton, Princess Margaret, Mick Jagger, Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, Sting and Trudy Styler, Leonard Bernstein, Rudolph Nureyev, Lauren Bacall, and Johnny Carson.

As Vidal accrued success after success—the late 60s into the early Reagan years were his apex, with Myra Breckinridge, Burr, Myron, 1876, Kalki, Creation, and Lincoln all best-sellers—the world came to him and stayed at the Vatican of Ravello. The visitor Vidal may have been most honored by was the reclusive Carson, who greatly admired Vidal and had him as a frequent guest on The Tonight Show. As the 20th century’s consummate TV-ready public intellectual, Vidal was always prepared to make the trip to NBC in Burbank to air his views or sell his wares. (There was a photo of Johnny and Joanna Carson on display in the big guest room at La Rondinaia, a reminder of the augustness of the guest bed to all lower-ranking visitors.) While Vidal revered Carson, he liked to inform people that he had been appearing on The Tonight Show since the days when it was hosted by Jack Paar.

After a few days of sitting in the piazza with Vidal and Austen, I began to see the entire point of Vidal’s long Italian journey. It was not only the solitude that La Rondinaia afforded. The villa is a four-story structure built into the side of a cliff overlooking the Tyrrhenian Sea. No one could ask for a more tranquil place to write. And it was not just the perspective that Vidal gained by being in Europe and watching the nation he wrote about from a distance. It was very much about the life of the piazza itself—its simplicity a stark contrast to the baroque intrigue and complicated webs Vidal depicted in his fiction and analyzed in his essays. (His 1993 collection, United States: Essays 1953 to 1992, won him the National Book Award.) For me, this revelation was a head-clearing exercise—and a great leveler. I was, at first, amazed that Vidal and Austen were well apprised of every storyline in the live soap opera of the piazza. They took great glee in spelling out all of the plots and subplots and conspiracy theories of the town. Vidal was supportive of the left-wing political figures in the village and advised local businessmen on political strategy. (He passionately argued for the construction of a funicular and against the building of an Oscar Niemeyer–designed music hall. Both battles were lost.) Ravello served as a distilled version of the wider complex worlds Vidal depicted in his work. His mastery of it was no less surprising than the mastery his genius imposed on every concept, place, or text. As a result of his isolation, he was not bombarded by most of the trivialities we all put up with in bigger towns. He got to cherry-pick the news—usually phoning friends in the afternoon and evening to find out what was going on wherever they were. “What’s happening in the great wide world?” he would ask. I never thought much about that phrase, but now I realize how meaningful it was. Though some believed—or wanted to believe—that Vidal was in a kind of exile, it was nothing of the sort. As he liked to say about his perch in Ravello, “It is a wonderful place from which to observe the end of the world.”