In Dante’s city

Basilica of Saint Vitale: Byzantine emperor Justinian I wears both halo and crown. To his left, the bald bishop of Ravenna stands beneath his name: Maximianus. All photos by Sydni Sterling

The beauty I saw…

— Dante, Paradiso, Canto xxx

Ravenna, Italy.

Swooping around the Franciscan bell tower, skimming the rooftops of old buildings, a half-dozen swifts wove the cold April evening towards dusk. At street level, maybe twenty people stood near Dante Alighieri’s simple tomb to hear a volunteer read a canto from The Divine Comedy, a Ravenna ritual conducted daily at 6 p.m. from April through October. 

A woman in her forties with thick, dark hair, who would have gone unnoticed in a crowed, stood at the microphone in her winter coat, cradling Dante’s magnum opus in her hands, and began.

I closed my eyes. Her contralto voice, propelled by Dante’s terza rima rhyme scheme, flowed like a slow, stately river. After a minute or two, I opened my eyes to see the swifts soaring high against the gray sky as Dante’s words grappled to find their way towards the beatific vision. 

And the thought came: this is why I travel.

Finished, she began to weep, and withdrew a wad of tissue paper from a coat pocket. The applause continued as three or four friends closed in to speak quietly to her or pat her on the back. When the time was right, I went over. Her dark eyes, moist and shining like blueberries in the rain, regarded me.

“I understand very little Italian,” I said in English. “But I closed my eyes. And I heard Dante’s voice through you. Grazie mille.”

A quick smile A whispered “thank you” in English. And she gave my forearm a firm squeeze that lingered a few pulse-beats before letting go. I don’t know which Canto she read, except I overheard someone say it was from Inferno. It doesn’t matter. I didn’t understand most of the words, but I heard other things.

Ravenna, “The City of Mosaics,” is a flat, low-key city of some 160,000 people situated near the Adriatic Sea between Rimini and Venice, and is home to eight UNESCO World Heritage sites. After years of wandering exile from Florence, Dante finished his masterpiece here not long before his death in 1321. The last of the three Canticles especially, Paradiso, carries traces of the light and beauty this most visual of poets found in Ravenna’s mosaics created some eight centuries before his death. 

The Arian Baptistry, a remnant of the “Arian Heresy” which took root in pre-Byzantine Ravenna, with its depiction of the baptism of Jesus.

The Instagram hordes largely bypass Ravenna for Venice and Florence. The travelers who pivot towards Ravenna come for the mosaics and/or Dante. Or, for the pilgrim soul, maybe something more. As Harriet Rubin writes in her book, Dante in Love, the mosaics make “a worshiper feel like a potential dweller in Paradise… Ravenna is the home of the drama of human transformation.” 

Last April, while standing beneath the mosaics of the Basilica of San Vitale, the most famous of Ravenna’s churches, the magisterial lines from Irish poet William Butler Yeats ran through my head:

And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.

Yeats never made it to Constantinople, “the holy city of Byzantium,” (modern-day Istanbul), the capital of the Byzantine Empire for more than a thousand years until it fell to the Ottomans in 1453. In fact, Yeats never traveled farther east than Ravenna. 

Ravenna is where Yeats found the Byzantium of his imagination. The winner of the 1924 Nobel Prize for literature wrote: “I think that in early Byzantium, maybe never before or since in recorded history, religious, aesthetic, and practical life were one…”

In 540, Byzantium came to Ravenna, where several early Christian sites on the UNESCO list were already in place. Emperor Justinian I, from his throne in Constantinople, sought to reclaim Italy from the Goths and reunite the old eastern and western parts of the Roman Empire; his forces recaptured Ravenna and made it his satellite capital in the west. All eight UNESCO sites – the Mausoleum of Galla Placidia, the Neonian Baptistery, the Basilica of Sant’Apollinare Nuovo, the Arian Baptistery, the Archiepiscopal Chapel, the Mausoleum of Theodoric, the Basilica of San Vitale and the Basilica of Sant’Apollinare in Classe – were constructed in the fifth and sixth centuries. 

Mausoleum of Gallo Placidia: The orange rectangle is an alabaster window. Here, in Paradiso, Dante wrote: “above a thousand lanterns or still more/I saw one sun that, soaring, lit them all.” The Cross represents Christ; Christ, in turn, represents the rising sun.

In the ancient Greek world, the concept of beauty, which influenced the early and medieval Doctors of the Church, was not a matter of personal taste — “the eye of the beholder” — but a durable set of standards. What the traveler finds in Ravenna testifies to the quest for beauty as an existential errand: the human soul is created to rise. 

This is how it feels to enter the octagonal Basilica of San Vitale, completed in 547, a decade after the completion of the magnificent Hagia Sophia in Constantinople. The artful simplicity of the mosaics, or tesserae, made of cut, colored glass the size of a thumbnail, along with the use of gold leaf, are captivating with their guileless, self-sufficient candor. The mosaics have looked down on visitors for nearly fifteen centuries, auditors of “what is past, passing, or to come” — Yeats again. 

Depictions of familiar religious narratives, and the wide eyes, the dreamlike precision of the figures, suggest the mysteries of faith beyond what can be seen or said, unlike the more naturalistic mosaics of the Greco-Roman world.

The mosaics of San Vitale, a sanctuary of calm and order built little more than two generations after the fall of Rome, cover the conch-like apse and presbytery walls. Here we find, among others, scenes from the Old Testament, including Moses and the burning bush, Cain and Abel, Jeremiah, Isaiah, fruit and flowers, birds as they were and still are. Above the altar, overseeing all, Christ sits on his celestial orb supported by four angels. Timelessness and the temporal are would-be perch-mates: the figures of Justinian I and his wife, the formidable Theodora, remind us of the pomp of earthly power and who wields it. But the timelessness of the Biblical stories reminds us that such power, and its attendant vanities, shall pass.

Beneath the dome a sixteenth century labyrinth leads to the sixth century altar of marble, a metaphorical journey of salvation through faith. The dome itself is steeply vertical, giving one the feeling of being drawn up to Heaven. Within the penumbral basilica, the colorful mosaics change with the sun’s progress. This is not a static universe.

Close by the Basilica of San Vitale is a small, unprepossessing brick building with a square tower. The Mausoleum of Galla Placidia was constructed during the enlightened reign of the Ostrogoth king Theodoric between 425 and 450. The UNESCO description of the mausoleum as “the best preserved of all monuments, and at the same time the most artistically perfect,” is a study in understatement.

A detail from beneath the star-filled sky inside the Mausoleum of Gallo Placidia.

Pallid light seeps through the fourteen alabaster windows into a room with a star-filled dome shining against an indigo sky. A golden cross at its center commands our attention. As the French writer André Frossard noted: “The golden cross, at the heart of its rotation of stars, acts as a transmitter of spiritual waves that pacify the whole building…” With timed entrances limited to a five-minute window, the brief experience of ageless beauty in that small space stamps the memory.

Paradiso, the most challenging and least read of Dante’s three canticles, is perhaps the most beautiful and rewarding of the three. Dante was, after all, employing words to reach what is beyond the sayable — the vision of the soul ascending towards “the love which moves the sun and the other stars.” 

Over the years, scholars have studied the visual and verbal echoes between the mosaics and Dante’s work. The correlations are often literal: “Her forehead shone with gemstones,” he wrote in Purgatorio of Theodora’s likeness in San Vitale.

In the Basilica of St. Apollinaris in Classe, the only UNESCO site a few miles outside of town, Dante noted: “And here remembering surpasses skill: / that cross, in sudden flaring, blazed out Christ.” This is from Paradiso, in which a gemmed Latin cross appears in a soft, blue sky of stars; Christ’s face is at the cross’s intersection.

The Divine Comedy chronicles the upward movement of the soul. The mosaics in the city where Dante died exert the same upward pull. 

Even now, all these months later, the public reading on that chill April evening is still with me. I think of the flight of swifts around the Franciscan bell tower above the church where Dante’s funeral was conducted and where, each evening, the tower bell rings in honor of the opening of Canto VIII in Purgatorio, and rings for us all: “It was the hour when a sailor’s thoughts / the first day out / turn for home…/and the new pilgrim aches with love…who hears the far off bell ringing.”

And I think of the woman who did the reading: the lingering firmness of her hand, through her tears, on my forearm.