THE RICHES OF RAVENNA

In a small city on Italy’s Adriatic coast, faces of all-powerful emperors, empresses, and bishops gaze out from glittering mosaics. But why are these magnificent decorations here? Judith Herrin explores the history of Ravenna, a well-connected city and one-time capital of the Western Roman Empire.

- Judith Herrin

When the Allied forces prepared to invade and occupy Italy in 1943, the British Naval Intelligence Division planned four handbooks covering every aspect of the country ‘for the use of persons in His Majesty’s service only’. The first was published in February 1944, five months after the first landings. Packed with diagrams and pull-out maps, it runs to 600 pages describing Italy’s coastal and regional topography at length. The second and third volumes give an account of every element of the country’s history, populations, roads, railways, agriculture, and industry. The final, 750-page volume, published in December 1945, describes the country’s 70 inland and 48 coastal towns. For Ravenna, a small city on the Adriatic coast of northern Italy, the handbook begins with a brief, authoritative statement: ‘As a centre of early Christian art Ravenna is unequalled’.

By the time this description was published, many parts of the city were in ruins. Fifty-two Allied bombing raids during the course of the Second World War had taken their toll, destroying some of Ravenna’s noteworthy, unequalled early Christian art. Bombs intended for the railway station and its sidings had pulverised the Basilica of San Giovanni Evangelista in August 1944. Commissioned by one of the city’s great monument-builders, Galla Placidia, this mid-5th-century church must have been a prime example of Ravenna’s outstanding art. The floor mosaics had already been lost when the building was modernised in the 17th century. But that August the mosaics on the walls, apse, and ceiling were also destroyed as the entire building collapsed.