Basilica of San Vitale

Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.

Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.

Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.

The Basilica of San Vitale stands in the centre of Ravenna, in the Emilia-Romagna region of northern Italy, at Via San Vitale 17. It was built between about 526 and 547, when Ravenna was the capital of late-Roman and then Byzantine Italy.

It holds the largest and best-preserved Byzantine mosaics outside Istanbul. The most celebrated are the apse panels of the emperor Justinian and the empress Theodora in procession, and the young Christ seated on a blue globe above a green meadow in the half-dome.

Bishop Ecclesius began the church around 526, while Ravenna was ruled by the Ostrogothic kings, and Bishop Maximian consecrated it in 547, after Justinian's reconquest of Italy. A local banker, Julius Argentarius, funded the construction.

They show the emperor Justinian and the empress Theodora, each haloed and crowned, advancing in procession with courtiers, soldiers, and clergy around the year 547. Neither ruler ever visited Ravenna; the panels assert imperial and church authority over the newly reconquered city.

Yes. San Vitale is one of eight Early Christian Monuments of Ravenna inscribed together on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1996, a group that also includes the Mausoleum of Galla Placidia and the Basilica of Sant'Apollinare in Classe.

The church is a double-shelled octagon, an eight-sided outer wall wrapped around an eight-sided core beneath a central dome. The design looks to Constantinople rather than Rome, and it later shaped Charlemagne's Palatine Chapel at Aachen, begun around 792.

Yes. It is open to visitors most days, generally from 9am into the early evening in the warm months and on shorter winter hours, and a single combined ticket admits you to the central group of monuments. The Mausoleum of Galla Placidia stands in the same garden.

It has been a meaningful gift for our customers with ties to Ravenna or a love of Byzantine art. San Vitale holds the city's most celebrated mosaics, the processions of Justinian and Theodora among them. A Keepsake or Small with a handwritten note from the studio carries well.

The piece runs to deep gold, green, and imperial purple, the colours of the apse and the side-wall processions. It sits well in jewel-tone Maximalist rooms, in Old-World Traditional studies, and against a warm neutral wall where the gold can do the work.

Yes. Ecclesiastical gold and saturated jewel tones have moved back into interiors alongside the heritage-revival look, and a Byzantine mosaic reads as both old and current. The colour lives in the ceramic surface, so it holds its depth under lamplight.

Above a sofa or a long console, a single Large holds the wall on its own. For a wider span, a four-tile Mural reads as one image, and a nine-tile Mural becomes the room's focal point. Smaller walls take a Medium.

Yes. For a bathroom, shower, or kitchen backsplash, choose the Dura Satin or Matte finish, both scratch-resistant and made for vertical, damp settings. The Glossy finish is better kept to framed wall pieces away from direct splashing.

Wipe it with a soft microfibre cloth and a little water. The colour is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure and lives beneath a thin finish, so it needs no polish and no special cleaner.

Yes. Every WenderVista piece is original to Wender Studios, our family studio in Knoxville, Tennessee. We paint and hand-finish each one in-house, with no outside licensing, so the San Vitale image is ours alone.