At the end of May 2012, Středověk jinak joined the excursion to Italy, organized by Jiří Kroupa and Ondřej Jakubec. We spent one intense and
unforgettable day in the northern Italian city of Ravenna. To see the most important monuments of the 5th and 6th centuries, some of us did
not hesitate to use an adventurous way of traveling: hitch-hiking. During the reign of Emperor Honorius (395–425), Ravenna
was the capital city of the Western Roman Empire. It was then that its nearly two-hundred-year period of fame began. The nearby port
of Classe on the Adriatic allowed for easy trade and artistic communication with Constantinople. We witnessed the fascinating communication of
the liturgy and the images here in several places: the presbytery of the Church of San Vitale, San Apollinare Nuovo, and the Baptistery of the
Orthodox. Whether the central building with complex mosaic decorations, bearing the name of Empress Galla Placidia, was a mausoleum or
a martyrium remains an unresolved question. In the apse of San Apollinare in Classe, we had the opportunity to see a sophisticated
and multi-level iconographic program in situ, presented to us in detail by Alžběta Filipová. The only problem we had, maybe, occurred
at the Museo Arcivescovile, where the local custodians had to expel us from Maximilian's ivory throne due to an unreasonably long visit (and
the imprints of our noses on the glass case).
Zuzana Frantová
(Translated by Anastasiia Ivanova)
