Ravenna

I had read about Ravenna. I thought I was prepared. I walked into the Mausoleum of Galla Placidia on a grey November morning, and whatever I had prepared myself for turned out to be insufficient. The space is small — barely larger than a chapel — and dark, and then your eyes adjust and the darkness resolves into blue. Deep, impossible, luminous blue: lapis lazuli blue covering the barrel-vaulted ceiling above you, studded with gold stars arranged in the concentric rings of the ancient cosmos, with a gold cross at the centre. The mosaics are from around 425 AD. They look like they were installed last month by someone who understood colour more completely than any decorator alive.

I stood there for perhaps ten minutes before I trusted myself to move. Then I walked into the light, blinked, and made the mistake of immediately entering San Vitale, which is larger and even more overwhelming: the Emperor Justinian and his court staring out from the apse with the particular fixity of Byzantine portraiture, the Empress Theodora in jewels so finely rendered you can distinguish individual gems. The mosaic technique involves small tesserae — cubes of coloured glass and gold — set at slightly varying angles to catch light differently across the surface. The result, especially in changing natural light, is a shimmer that no reproduction conveys. Every picture of these mosaics is a lie by subtraction.

Ravenna was the capital of the Western Roman Empire in its final decades, then the capital of the Ostrogothic Kingdom under Theodoric, then the Byzantine Exarchate. It accumulated monuments the way capitals do — each new ruler building to demonstrate legitimacy — and then got left behind when political gravity shifted north. The result is a city that was frozen at its moment of greatest splendour, which happened to be the fifth and sixth centuries. Eight UNESCO World Heritage sites are located within a short walk of each other through a flat, pleasant, slightly provincial modern town that has absorbed this extraordinary inheritance without being consumed by it. The Ravennati seem genuinely unbothered by the fact that they live surrounded by some of the greatest art in Europe.

Dante died here. His tomb is in the centre of town — a small neoclassical structure in a quiet garden — and the city has maintained his remains against the wishes of Florence, which has been trying to reclaim them since 1519 and has been refused every time. There is something characteristically Emilian about this: an attachment to the local thing, a refusal to surrender it even to more famous claimants.

The city works well as a day trip from Bologna — forty-five minutes by fast train — but deserves an overnight. By six in the evening, when the day visitors have left, Ravenna becomes genuinely quiet and the light in the piazzas has a quality that the afternoon crowds obscure. I ate piadina — the flatbread of the Romagna coast, stuffed here with squacquerone cheese and wild rocket — from a kiosk on Piazza del Popolo and walked back to San Vitale, which was closing but still lit, the mosaics visible through the iron gate, still shimmering in the dusk.

When to go: April and May, or September and October. The summer draws significant crowds to the mosaics, which are not improved by queuing. Ravenna is genuinely beautiful in the off-season, when the light quality in November can make the mosaics look particularly extraordinary through the church windows.