Ravenna

• 1. Introduction

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  Ravenna sits in the flatlands of northern Italy, an inland city that was once washed by the Adriatic Sea, and it has been the capital of more empires than almost any city in Europe. It served as the seat of the Western Roman Empire in its final decades, then the Ostrogothic Kingdom, then the Byzantine Exarchate. Few cities carry that kind of weight. By the time the last Western Roman emperor was deposed there in 476, Ravenna was home to around 50,000 people, a city of marshes and mosaics that rulers chose not for glamour but for survival. What made a swamp city the center of the ancient world? How did a place built on piles over a lagoon become the hinge on which late antiquity turned? And what does it mean that this city, of all cities, is where Dante spent his final years, where Lord Byron chased a forbidden love, and where Julius Caesar gathered his army before crossing the Rubicon?

• 2. A City Built on Water

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  Julius Caesar was at Ravenna in 49 BC when he assembled his forces before the crossing that would ignite a civil war. The choice was not accidental. Ravenna was already a place apart: a settlement of houses raised on timber piles across a web of small islands in a marshy lagoon, its situation compared, centuries later, to that of Venice. The Umbri people had been there since at least the 5th century BC, undisturbed until roughly the 3rd century BC when Rome first made contact. By 89 BC, Rome had absorbed Ravenna as a federated town, not by conquest but by agreement.

  Octavian, following his victory over Mark Antony in 31 BC, founded the military harbor of Classis just outside the city. Protected at first by its own walls, Classis became an important station of the Roman Imperial Fleet, projecting Roman power across the Adriatic. Emperor Trajan added a 70-kilometer aqueduct at the start of the 2nd century. During the Marcomannic Wars, Germanic settlers in Ravenna revolted and briefly held the city, a crisis that led Marcus Aurelius to reverse policy on barbarian settlement in Italy entirely.

  The swamps that could be a liability were also a shield. When Emperor Honorius moved his court from Mediolanum to Ravenna in 402, the choice was partly defensive: the marshes made siege difficult. The city's port also maintained sea-lanes to the Eastern Roman Empire, a lifeline as the western provinces buckled. Ravenna held even when the Visigoth king Alaric I simply went around it in 409, choosing instead to sack Rome and take the emperor's relative Galla Placidia hostage.

• 3. The Imperial Mosaics

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  Galla Placidia returned to Ravenna with her son, Emperor Valentinian III, backed by her nephew Theodosius II. The peace that followed produced some of Ravenna's most durable monuments. Among them were the Orthodox Baptistry, the Basilica of San Vitale completed in 548, and what is known as the Mausoleum of Galla Placidia, though she was not actually buried there. Eight of these buildings together now form the UNESCO World Heritage Site designated as the Early Christian Monuments of Ravenna.

  The building program did not end with the Romans. Theodoric the Great, who took the city in 493 and killed Odoacer with his own hands according to tradition, built his own palace church Sant'Apollinare Nuovo, an Arian cathedral that is now called Santo Spirito, an Arian Baptistery, and a mausoleum outside the walls. In 519, when a mob burned down the synagogues of Ravenna, Theodoric ordered the city to rebuild them at its own expense. His reign offered Roman citizens their own laws and courts while Goths lived under Gothic custom.

  The Byzantine building program after 540 added the Basilica of Sant'Apollinare in Classe, consecrated in 549, along with San Michele in Africisco. From 540 to 600, Ravenna's bishops pursued an intensive construction effort in the city and around the port of Classe. The concentration of mosaic work from these overlapping centuries was so exceptional that Ravenna became known as the capital of mosaics, a distinction it still holds, supported by active workshops and schools devoted to the craft.

• 4. Theodoric and the Gothic Kingdom

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  Odoacer had deposed the last Western emperor, Romulus Augustulus, in 476 and ruled Italy for 13 years from Ravenna. His end came when the Eastern Emperor Zeno dispatched Theodoric the Great and the Ostrogoths to retake the peninsula. After the Battle of Verona, Odoacer fell back to Ravenna and withstood a siege of three years. Only when Theodoric took Rimini and cut off Ravenna's food supply did the city fall, in 493.

  Theodoric's reign proved unusually stable. Both he and Odoacer before him were Arian Christians, a sect that placed them at odds with the Nicene Christianity of the Latin population, yet practical coexistence was the rule. Ravenna's Nicene bishops continued building. The sole surviving monument from their projects is the Cappella Arcivescovile. Theodoric died in 526. His successor was his young grandson Athalaric, who ruled under the regency of Theodoric's daughter Amalasuintha; both were dead by 535, leaving Theodoric's bloodline represented only by Amalasuintha's daughter Mataswintha.

  The weakness that followed drew the attention of the Byzantine Emperor Justinian I, who opposed both Ostrogothic rule and the Arian faith. His general Belisarius invaded Italy in 535 and captured Ravenna in 540. After the complete conquest of Italy in 554, Ravenna became the administrative center of Byzantine Italy, and the archbishop of Ravenna held the second rank in Italy after the pope himself.

• 5. Popes, Kings, and the Donation of Pepin

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  In 666, the Byzantine emperor temporarily granted the archbishop of Ravenna autonomy from Rome, a privilege called autocephaly. It did not last, but it reflected how much ecclesiastical weight the city carried through the early medieval centuries. That weight became contested territory as the Lombards pushed south. King Liutprand occupied Ravenna in 712 and was forced to give it back. A generation later, Aistulf, crowned King of the Lombards in 749, took a more aggressive line.

  In 751, the Byzantines surrendered the Exarchate of Ravenna to Aistulf, who then marched toward Rome, demanding tribute and sovereignty from the pope. Pope Stephen II traveled to France in 753 to ask Pepin, King of the Franks, for military help. Pepin conducted two campaigns into Italy and by 756 had forced Aistulf to concede defeat, surrender territory, and pay reparations. Pepin then made good on a promise from two years prior: he granted the pope authority over a vast stretch of territory that included the former Exarchate of Ravenna. This act, known as the Donation of Pepin, provided the legal foundation for the Papal States.

  Ravenna spent the following centuries under indirect papal control, with local lords and Lombard nobles exercising real power while popes competed with Holy Roman Emperors for formal authority. In 1218, Pietro Traversari took power after defeating rival factions. The Traversari family ruled for 22 years until 1240, when Emperor Frederick II besieged the city and expelled them. In 1275, the Traversari were ousted again, this time by Guido Novello da Polenta, whose family governed as papal vassals with growing independence.

• 6. Dante, Byron, and Literary Ravenna

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  Dante Alighieri spent most of his years of exile in Ravenna after banishment from Florence, and he mentions the city in the fifth canto of the Inferno. His funeral was held in 1321 at the Basilica of San Francesco. He is buried in a tomb beside that church, and the local authorities resisted for centuries every demand from Florence for his remains.

  Lord Byron arrived in 1819 and stayed until 1821, drawn by his love for Teresa Guiccioli, a young married noblewoman of the local aristocracy. In Ravenna he continued Don Juan and wrote the Ravenna Diary, My Dictionary, and Recollections. Oscar Wilde wrote a poem called Ravenna in 1878. The Russian Symbolist poet Alexander Blok wrote his own poem entitled Ravenna between May and June 1909, during an Italian journey that spring. Hermann Hesse wrote two poems about the city during his travels, titled Ravenna (1) and Ravenna (2).

  Mary Shelley set a scene of her post-apocalyptic novel The Last Man in Ravenna, where her protagonist Lionel comes ashore after losing companions in a storm. Thomas Middleton used the city as the setting for his play The Witch, written in the 1610s. T. S. Eliot's poem Lune de Miel, written in French, pictures a honeymooning couple from Indiana sleeping near the Basilica of Sant'Apollinare in Classe, a building Eliot singles out for the carved acanthus leaves on its columns. J. R. R. Tolkien, according to the source, may have drawn on Ravenna at least in part when designing Minas Tirith.

• 7. World War II and Liberation

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  Ravenna entered the Second World War as a city already layered with monuments no other European city could match. It left that war with serious wounds. Fifty-two Allied bombing raids struck the city. Bombs aimed at the railway station and its sidings pulverized the Basilica of San Giovanni Evangelista in August 1944, a 5th-century church originally built by Galla Placidia after she survived a storm at sea.

  On the 5th of November 1944, troops of the 4th Princess Louise Dragoon Guards, the 5th Canadian Armoured Division, and the British 27th Lancers entered Ravenna and liberated it. The Ravenna War Cemetery holds 937 Commonwealth soldiers who died in the winter of 1944-45, among them 438 Canadians.

  The Basilica of San Giovanni Evangelista was restored after the war, though the bell tower's two largest bells dated back to 1208, well before even the Venetian century of rule. The city that had fallen to Visigoths, Ostrogoths, Byzantines, Lombards, French armies, and now Allied bombs continued to hold its ground. Ravenna's population today stands at 156,444, and the Rocca Brancaleone, the castle the Venetians built in 1457, is now a public park.