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Villa Cimbrone stands on a rocky outcrop known as "Cimbronium", and it is from this landscape feature that the villa takes its name. The earliest references to the villa date back to the eleventh century AD, when the villa belonged the Accongiogioco, a noble family. It later passed to the ownership of a wealthy and influential family, the Fusco, who are also recorded in 1291 as owning the local church of S. Angelo de Cimbrone.

After having been owned by several other Italian families, an English politician by Ernest William Beckett had visited the villa during his travels in Italy and had fallen in love with it. He bought it from the Amici family in 1904, and enlisted the help of Nicola Mansi, a tailor-barber-builder from Ravello whom he had met in England, to help with the restoration and enlargement of the villa and gardens.

He embarked on an ambitious programme of works, including the construction of battlements, terraces and cloisters in a mixture of mock-Gothic, Moorish and Venetian architectural styles. The gardens were similarly redeveloped. Beckett died in London in 1917 and his body was brought to Villa Cimbrone to be buried at the base of the Temple of Bacchus in the gardens.