W.H. Auden first came to Forio in 1948, drawn by the cheap cost of living and the light, and returned every summer for years, staying in a house in the centro storico with his companion Chester Kallman. The summers in Forio were productive: he wrote much of the libretto for Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress here, along with a number of the poems that appear in Nones and The Shield of Achilles. He was not the only poet on the island — Pablo Neruda was also a regular visitor.
The house itself is not a museum and is privately owned, but the building is visible from the street and is marked by a small plaque. For readers of Auden, it is worth finding — the narrow lane, the shuttered windows, the view of the church tower, all of it exactly as it would have been when he sat here working. Forio feels, even now, like the kind of place that might produce good writing.