Mosaics: Legos of the ancient world

Yesterday my friend Bianca and I went to Ravenna, a little over an hour and a half by train.  Ravenna is famous for one thing: mosaics in churches.  As I've noted, Italian culture is very much centered around the institution of free time.  Italians do with their free time what they can.  When you've got free time and a whole bunch of colored rocks, you make mosaics.  The first church we saw, San Giovanni Evangelista, was really impressive:

Inside are some of the famous mosaics:

I assume that this mosaic sat outside a Byzantine-era Starbucks:

We also saw the Tomb of Dante.  He died in Ravenna after being exiled from Florence, and despite Florence's pleas Ravenna has never given him back.  You had your chance, Florence.  He's over you.  Move on and find a new poet.

"Under this mound the bones of Dante rested safely from March 23, 1944 to December 19, 1945."

He's still there somewhere in the small complex (that building above plus a small garden, through precisely where I don't know).

Our next stop was San Vitale and its attached museum, which was really, really impressive.  Unfortunately I couldn't take any photos inside San Vitale or the museum, but San Vitale is definitely the place to see in Ravenna.  It's a roughly circular church with two stories and awesome columns holding up the whole structure.  San Vitale and several smaller sites are all together in an area with one ticket.  Here's the cloisters there, now a part of the museum:

The Mausoleum of Galla Placidia, also in that complex:

And outside San Vitale:

As I said, Ravenna does mosaics in spades.  That's great, but after seeing San Vitale, our visits to the other churches felt a lot like more of the same.  The faces of Jesus and the apostles in their antiquated low-resolution glory can get a little repetitive after a few hours, especially when the majority of the figures depicted are identical brown-haired men with beards.

We had, as part of our Ravenna-wide tickets, access to an archeological dig site in the nearby town of Classe, so we took a four minute train ride there.  The first thing to see there was another church.  Very nice, you guys sure like your Catholicism, we understand that.  We asked where the dig site was, and the lady at the desk pointed down a road and said "before the bridge."  And so we walked.

Dear readers, Classe is the West Virginia of Italy.  Here's a photo that succinctly summarizes my Classe experience:

Flat and foggy.  We walked alongside that completely straight road, parallel to the train tracks, across the completely flat landscape back toward Ravenna.  Being from edge of the Appalachian region, I didn't believe that such natural flatness existed, but all the midwesterners here say that it's just like home.  We walked and walked through the melancholy haze of Classe until finally--and surprisingly, as we thought we'd missed it--we reached the dig site.  Closed.

By the time we reached the site, it was too dark, though the man there was extremely kind and let us into the mini-museum.  When we told him we were American, he wanted to talk about hurricanes and cars, and then told us to come back some day when it was nicer.  Seeing as the site is an hour's walk away from both Classe and Ravenna, that's probably not going to happen.

We did the walk back to Ravenna just because we could; the four-minute train ride was under two hours on foot.  I'm fairly certain that the grass actually got greener, and the air more pleasant, as we crossed the border between Classe and Ravenna.  Great trip overall!  Venice this weekend!