Gold on the walls — 8 UNESCO sites and the finest Byzantine mosaics in the Western world
Ravenna is a flat, quiet city in northeastern Italy that contains a disproportionate share of the world's greatest art: eight early Christian monuments inscribed as a single UNESCO World Heritage Site, all crammed into a town of 160,000 people. The mosaics inside the Mausoleum of Galla Placidia, the Basilica of San Vitale, and the Basilica of Sant'Apollinare Nuovo date from the 5th and 6th centuries AD and are so saturated with gold and colour that they still stop visitors cold. Ravenna was successively the capital of the Western Roman Empire, the Ostrogothic Kingdom, and the Byzantine Exarch…
Ravenna became the capital of the Western Roman Empire under Emperor Honorius in 402 AD, chosen for its strategic marshland location and Adriatic access. After Rome fell in 476, the Ostrogothic king Theodoric the Great ruled from here and sponsored a building programme that blended Roman and Germanic Gothic styles. In 540 the Byzantine general Belisarius retook the city for Constantinople, beginning a century-long Byzantine Exarchate that produced the golden age of mosaic art. The city declined after the Lombard invasions of 751 but its monuments survived intact, making it one of the most imp…