The garden of Villa Rufolo, known as the “garden of the soul”, it occupies two levels and can be reached along a tree-lined avenue with a decidedly Victorian air. The ancient walls, almost hidden by cypresses and lime trees, lead to the Moorish cloister. You have time to savor the noble lines of the monument's architecture before descending a few steps to the first level of the garden.

The history of the garden of Villa Rufolo, can be divided into three stages:

• The historical phase:dating from the 13th century, when the villa was built.
• The medieval phase: of which we have only very few testimonies that refer, to what has been praised by the Boccaccio on the first day of the Decameron and the hypothesis according to which it is possible that the gardens extended to other Rufolo properties.
• The Romantic phase:, she is the one who sees Francis Nevile Reid as tutelary deity, noble Scottish philanthropist expert in botany and ancient art, a title that earned him the position of Honorary Superintendent by the Prefect of Naples.

The Reid era marked the rebirth of the gardens of Villa Rufolo and also the beginning of the fame of the Villa. It was May 1880 When Wagner visited Ravello and “you discover” the enchanted garden of Klingsor as he had imagined for his work Parsifal. Wagner imagined the very tall medieval tower collapsing into nothingness and becoming an enchanted garden, and then the tropical plants take on the appearance of splendid maidens, and finally the garden itself turns into a desert in the moment in which Parsifal kills the necromancer Klingsor.
Attracted by the mild climate and the beauty of the places Neville Reid chose Villa Rufolo as his summer residence, acquiring various species of exotic plants for the Villa.

Over time, and particularly in the twentieth century, the gardens have undergone a series of demolitions: during the war they were confiscated by the British forces; in 1951 they suffered from a particularly violent storm; It is in the 1955 the construction of the provincial road eliminated the upper part of the garden.