Ravenna
— — a city that paints with gold and glass.
Not only on a wall.
“Ravenna was once the capital of the Western Roman Empire, then of Ostrogothic Italy, then a Byzantine outpost on the Adriatic. What it kept is the mosaics. Eight buildings hold the most complete early Christian mosaic cycles anywhere — Galla Placidia, San Vitale, Sant'Apollinare in Classe. Gold and glass set into vaulted brick, fifteen hundred years ago, still catching the morning light. Dante is buried here. He chose the city for the quiet.
Ravenna, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
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.
The place, in three passes.
Ravenna sits a few kilometres inland from the Adriatic in the eastern Emilia-Romagna, on the alluvial plain south of the Po delta. The Western Roman Emperor Honorius moved his capital here in 402 CE because the surrounding marshes made the city easier to defend than Milan. It served as capital of the Western Empire until 476, then of the Ostrogothic Kingdom under Theodoric, and from 540 of the Byzantine Exarchate. Today the population is roughly 159,000. The historic centre lies about eight kilometres from the sea, connected by the Candiano canal.
Eight early Christian monuments in Ravenna were inscribed together by UNESCO in 1996 for holding the most important surviving mosaic cycles outside Constantinople. The Mausoleum of Galla Placidia, built around 425, contains the oldest of them — a deep blue vault scattered with gold stars above the daughter of Theodosius I. The Basilica of San Vitale, consecrated in 547, holds the famous panels of Justinian and Theodora in procession. Sant'Apollinare in Classe, finished in 549, stands alone in a field five kilometres from the centre.
The Ravenna mosaics work because of glass. The tesserae are cubes of coloured silica with gold leaf sandwiched between two thin layers, tilted at small irregular angles so the light catches them unevenly. A vault that looks flat at noon resolves into deep gold at lower angles in the morning and late afternoon. The mosaicists of the fifth and sixth centuries understood this precisely and laid the gold backgrounds with the angles in mind. Dante, who died here in 1321 and is buried in a small neoclassical tomb beside the Basilica of San Francesco, knew the light well.