For a brief, dazzling moment, Ravenna was an unlikely refuge for a world drifting apart. The city’s history, enshrined in superb Byzantine mosaics, reflects the twilight of the Roman Empire and the beginning of the Middle Ages. While ageless monuments were falling everywhere, Ravenna was crowded with new and sumptuous palaces and monuments. As the capital of the Western Roman Empire in its last days, then of the occidental provinces of the Byzantine Empire, it offered a refuge of luxury and splendor, a return to antique civilization rising above the relentless waves of Barbarians.
Art historian Elaine Ruffolo leads an exploration of Ravenna's extraordinary early Christian-era structures, which UNESCO has recognized for their magnificent displays of mosaic art, and what they reveal of artistic and religious relationships and contacts at an important period of European cultural history.
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