Ravenna

I've been wanting to visit Ravenna (A UNESCO World Heritage Site) for weeks since I read the city was famous for its 5th and 6th century tile mosaics.  Robbie wasn't super excited for this day trip but since we have decided we wanted to see as much of Italy as possible, he was ready to go explore too.  We are the worst, laziest tourists ever.  Half the time we just drive to a place and wander around, then when we get home we research everything we saw and realize that either we missed some really cool stuff and need to go back, or that something we saw is way cooler than we thought it was and we need to go back to see it again.  This time I actually looked up some of the good places to go ahead of time and wrote down the names of things I wanted to make sure we saw.  But we still drove down there not knowing where anything was, followed the signs to the city center, found a place to park, and decided to just wander around until we found something.

Our first stop (which was not on my list) was a mosaic museum we found called TAMO that had some really neat old and more modern mosaics.  One whole section of the museum was dedicated to mosaics of Dante's Inferno, so we wandered through looking at the depictions of the harpies, the centaurs, the devil, and eventually paradise.  Each mosaic had the passage from the poem posted next to it, so if you can read Italian, you'd know what you were looking at.  It was amazing how much detail is in these mosaics--how you can see expressions on the faces of the subjects in the mosaics, and how many different colors and pieces are used to make them up.  They were really fun to see up close.  And Robbie started to get excited about mosaics.

 Lucifer

 

 Close-up of the tiles

 

 The Harpies

 

 Paradise

 

 Paradise

 

Paradise

 

These were the modern mosaics and were very bright and colorful.  The museum also had displays of older mosaics, and pieces of mosaic floors.  We were glad to have stopped here.

 

 TAMO museum

 

 

Mosaic with tiny, tiny tiles

 

Once we finished here we needed to get something to eat, so we asked the people at the desk for a recommendation. She pulled out a map of Ravenna with all the major sites listed and pointed out a few good lunch areas. Score! A map!  So we had a quick lunch, then walked down the street a little ways to see the tomb of Dante.

 

Dante loved Florence and lived there for most of his life, but was exiled for political reasons before he died.  So he died and was buried in Ravenna.  His mausoleum is near the center of town.

 

 The mausoleum

 



 

In a small garden behind the mausoleum was this mound with a stone marker that said Dante's remains were buried here from March 23, 1944 to December 19, 1945.  They were worried that the mausoleum could be destroyed during the bombings of World War II, so they buried the urn with his remains here.

 

 

Apparently Florence has repeatedly requested that Dante's remains be moved back to Florence since that's the city he loved and where he did much of his work, but Ravenna has refused.  In the tomb, there is an oil lamp burning.  The city of Florence supplies the oil for the lamp as a penance for exiling Dante.

 

Our next stop was the Bisilica di San Vitale, with some gorgeous mosaics depicting Justinian and Theodora (Theodora was the empress of the Byzantine empire. She lived from the year 500 to 548). The pictures really can't do these mosaics justice. When you walk into the church, they glitter and sparkle.  They're very beautiful.

 

 

 

 

Theodora and Justinian and their court

 

 

Next we walked a few yards over to the Mausoleo di Galla Placidia.  According to our map, she was "daughter, sister, wife, and mother of emperors [and] reigned the Western Roman Empire and halfway through the V century had this small Mausoleum built."  One of the signs inside said she is almost definitely not buried here so I guess it's more of a shrine to her.

 

 

 

Next we walked back across town to find the baptistery.  Stopping for a quick second to take a picture of Piazza J.F. Kennedy (which we thought was random).

 

 

 The Battistero degli Ortodossi is one of the oldest sites in Ravenna, dating back to the 4th or beginning of the 5th century.  In the middle of the ceiling you can see Jesus being baptized in the Jordan river by John the Baptist.  The man with the beard off to the right of Jesus is the human personification of the river.  The twelve disciples are represented in the second tier.

 

 The ceiling of the baptistery

 The baptistery with the pulpit

 Close-up of one of the disciples

 

This baptistery was right next to the Duomo, so we took a quick walk in there too.  There were some mosaics on the floor, but the ceilings here were mostly frescoed.  There were some really neat old wooden pews, and the characteristic that was so striking to me was the large Latin lettering that went around the upper inside walls of the main church.  Most of this cathedral wasn't as ornate as the others we've seen except for the little side chapels or capellas.  They were full of gold, paintings, and sculpture.

 



 

Right next to the Duomo was the Museo Arcivescovile.  You weren't allowed to take pictures, but the museum housed many artifacts from the old cathedral and other sites around Ravenna.  The most famous piece was the ivory throne used by Maximian which was sculpted in the 6th century.  There were also gold and silver crosses, tons of jewels that were worn by the bishop (diamonds, amethysts, emeralds, sapphires, and more. They were beautiful but very opulent). This museum also houses the Chapel of St. Andrew which is covered in mosaics.

 

By this time, Michael was pretty much done with the sightseeing so though there were a few other places we wanted to check out, we headed back to the car to drive home. We did get to see quite a bit, but I wouldn't mind another visit sometime to see the other UNESCO monuments. It was a fun day, and I think Robbie is a converted mosaic lover.