Ravenna

On Monday, August 20th, we went up to breakfast, and after saying goodbye to the Canadian mother and daughter, went down with the Signora to the office.  She was a friend of Marco, and was operating Al Campaniel while he was away.  While we were paying the bill, something she said in French made it clear that she wasn't Signora, but Madame, and soon she and Mary Joy, who had been laboring somewhat to converse in Italian, were chatting away much more comfortably in French.  She was originally from Paris, but after retirement she was now living in Venice: the Italians were much nicer people than the French, who were only interested in themselves.  However she did go back to France for medical care.  The French medical system was much better.

We left our luggage in our room and quickly went to the shop where Mary Joy had noticed the sweaters, and soon Mary Joy had a very nice new wool and silk sweater, after I chose the color (otherwise, we'd still be there).

Then we picked up our luggage, said goodbye to Madame and went to the train station.    I got our ticket from the ticket machine, and after stamping it in one of the yellow boxes, we boarded the high-speed train for Bologna.  We had considered going to Ravenna via Ferrara, which sounds like an interesting town to look around in, but after our Vicenza experience, we checked to see if there was a left luggage deposit at the Ferrara station.  None that I could find online.  So that was out.  Bologna, as one of the larger cities in Italy, definitely had one.  In addition, Bologna "the fat" has the reputation of being the food capital of Italy, so we figured it might be a good place to find lunch, between trains.

We arrived in Bologna and paid our five euros (a bit pricy) to deposit our luggage.  I remembered that the last time we had been in Bologna (in 2001, also between trains, but for a number of hours, instead of for a little more than an hour), the walk from the train station to the center of town had been rather lengthy, so we asked the man at the left luggage where we could catch a bus downtown.  He replied that we could walk it in ten minutes.  Okay.  So we asked a young woman for directions and started walking, aiming for what sounded like an interesting (and fast) deli-cafeteria called Tamburini.  We walked, and walked, and walked.  Again, either Italians run everywhere instead of walking (for which I had seen no evidence) or they have a tendency to be optimistic about how long it takes to walk somewhere.

But eventually we got to Tamburini, picked up some local specialties in the cafeteria line, shared a table with an Italian lady who was busily reading some book, gobbled down our food, and hurried back to the station in time to pick up our luggage and catch the regional train to Ravenna.  Ravenna isn't exactly a backwater, but apparently there are no high-speed trains running from Bologna down the Adriatic coast.

We eventually got to Ravenna, walked the half mile to our hotel, the Centrale Byron (which Lord Byron had never stayed at), a nice hotel in the center of everything.  I half suspected that the writer for Lonely Planet Italy had stayed there and not strayed very far away, since all the recommended restaurants were within two blocks.

Ravenna has eight Unesco World Heritage sites.  It is unique in Italy because when the Roman Empire was collapsing in the fifth century, it was the capital of what was left.  It then became the capital of the Ostrogothic kingdom that came into being in Italy in the late fifth and early sixth centuries.  And when the Byzantine Emperor Justinian reconquered Italy in the middle of the sixth century, it was his administrative capital for this territory.  Ravenna was a naval base (since then, I think, the harbor has silted in and moved farther away, as was the case with Ephesus and Bruges), easily defended from the land and easily supplied by water.

We had two hours until most of these sites closed, so we went to the most important first: the church of San Vitale and the adjoining Mausoleum of Galla Placidia.  There we bought one ticket (I think it was nine euros per person) that covered five sites.  We went into the church and were completely blown away.  While the upper part and interior of the dome were painted in baroque style in the eighteenth century, what really matters is the mosaics around the sanctuary.  Nearly fifteen centuries old, they show a naturalness and insight into character and emotion that completely surprised Mary Joy, who had low expectations of art from the "Dark Ages," long before Giotto and the Renaissance.  Unfaded over all these years, these mosaics gleam as if they were made yesterday.  Along with portraits of saints and biblical figures, the artists memorialized the Emperor and his court.  Around the same time that Hagia Sophia was being built in Constantinople, with similar mosaics, little bits of glass were used to portray, on the left side of the sanctuary, Justinian and certain priests and military men.  On the right side are his empress, the former dancer Theodosia, along with an entourage of her own.  Above the altar is a clean-shaven Jesus, accompanied by angels, St. Vitalis (the church's patron saint) and (holding a model of the church) the already-deceased bishop who had begun to build the church (his then-current successor is pictured among Justinian's entourage).

Simply glorious.

We then walked across to the Mausoleum.  Besides being the sister and wife of Roman emperors, Galla Placidia was also at one point married to the king of the Gothic invaders.  Her tomb, too has wonderful mosaics: a starry ceiling; a beardless Christ as the Good Shepherd.  Early Christian portraits didn't generally show Jesus with a beard.  Most Romans at that time were clean-shaven.

On our way out of the grounds, we heard organ music coming from the church.  We went back in to check this out, and discovered that the organ was high up on the upper level, off to the right of the church, at the level of the baroque murals.  It seemed oddly inappropriate to the mosaics, especially considering what the organist was playing: a transcription of Mozart's Eine Kleine Nachtmusik.

Before 8 o'clock we also saw two baptisteries covered with mosaics, one of them orthodox, the other related to the cathedral of the Arian heresy.  The Ostrogoths were Arians, who didn't believe in the humanity of Jesus.  According to them, his human body was just a disguise put on to hide his true, divine nature.
Heretics or not, they could do mosaic work as glorious as that of Justinian's later artists.  The church of San Apollinare Nuovo began around 500 as the chapel to the palace of Theodoric the Great, King of the Ostrogoths.  High on the side walls of the church, mosaics show the palace, as well as two long lines of saints dressed in white: male on the right, female on the left.  Each of them is wonderfully individualized.  In addition, toward the left front, in what I think is Gothic garb, are the Magi, labeled "Balthasar, Melchior, Caspar," approaching the mother and child with their gifts.  Across from them is Christ in judgment.

Finally, we went back to the hotel and got ready for dinner.  We went to La Gardela, a recommended trattoria.  Again, I'm sorry, but I don't remember what we ate, except that it was good.  Sitting alone at the next table was a woman who turned out to be an American, a retired operatic soprano who had lived in Europe for 29 years and was married to a well-known concert pianist (at least, Mary Joy had heard of him, though I hadn't).  They now lived in Brussels, and she had some stories about a fellow Brussels expat, Mary Joy's idol, the eccentric Argentine pianist Marta Argerich.  She didn't know Argerich, but their paths had crossed in odd ways.  Once she had had to get a new formal dress for performance, and when she explained this to the dressmakers for tax purposes, they replied that someone else had just gotten the same dress for the same purpose.  They looked up the name, and it was Marta Argerich.  Another time, since Argerich is known for canceling concerts with little or no notice, the soprano's husband was engaged as her backup, and, indeed, he had to play in her stead.

She said that the only time she had ever been in Minnesota was to sing for the Schubert Club in St. Paul, in the early nineties.  She had a number of stories, such as the problems involved in doing a production of Wozzeck (very dark, depressing and atonal) in a newly-restored opera house in Sicily in a cold January, with no heat.

We ended up closing the restaurant, around midnight, and pointed her on her way to her hotel.  We offered to accompany her, but she said that the area wasn't dangerous, especially compared to the neighborhood in Spanish Harlem where she had lived as a student.  On getting there at night, she would walk down the middle of the street, singing operatic arias at the top of her voice, and no one ever bothered her.  I suggested that it might be that any potential muggers were afraid of catching whatever it was that she had, and she agreed that even muggers stayed away from crazy people.