Ravenna, A Study | Page 2

wrought, as is meet, beautiful with many
fading colours, and encrusted with precious stones: its name is
Ravenna.
It stands there laden with the mysterious centuries as with half barbaric
jewels, weighed down with the ornaments of Byzantium, rigid, hieratic,
constrained; and however you come to it, whether from Rimini by the
lost and forgotten towns of Classis and Caesarea, or from Ferrara
through all the bitter desolation of Comacchio, or across the endless
marsh from Bologna or Faenza, its wide and empty horizons, its
astonishing silence, and the difficulty of every approach will seem to
you but a fitting environment for a place so solitary and so imperious.
For this city of mute and closed churches, where imperishable mosaics
glisten in the awful damp, and beautiful pillars of most precious
marbles gleam through a humid mist, of mausoleums empty but
indestructible, of tottering campanili, of sumptuous splendour and
incredible decay, is the sepulchre of the great civilisation which
Christianity failed to save alive, but to which we owe everything and
out of which we are come; the only monument that remains to us of
those confused and half barbaric centuries which lie between Antiquity
and the Middle Age.
Mysteriously secured by nature and doubly so after the failure of the
Roman administration, Ravenna was the death-bed of the empire and
its tomb. To her the emperor Honorius fled from Milan in the first years
of the fifth century; within her walls Odoacer dethroned the last
emperor of the West, founded a kingdom, and was in his turn
supplanted by Theodoric the Ostrogoth. It was from her almost
impregnable isolation that the attempt was made by Byzantium--it
seemed and perhaps it was our only hope--to reconquer Italy and the
West for civilisation; while her fall before the appalling Lombard onset
in the eighth century brought Pepin into Italy in 754, to lay the
foundation of a new Christendom, to establish the temporal power of
the papacy, and to prophesy of the resurrection of the empire, of the
unity of Europe.
But though it is as the imperishable monument of those tragic centuries

that we rightly look upon Ravenna: before the empire was founded she
was already famous. It was from her silence that Caesar emerged to
cross the Rubicon and all unknowing to found what, when all is said,
was the most beneficent, as it was the most universal, government that
Europe has ever known. In the first years of that government Ravenna
became, and through the four hundred years of its unhampered life she
remained, one of its greatest bulwarks. While upon its failure, as I have
said, she suddenly assumed a position which for some three hundred
and fifty years was unique not only in Italy but in Europe. And when
with the re-establishment of an universal government her importance
declined and at length passed away, she yet lived on in the minds and
the memory of men as something fabulous and still, curiously enough,
as a refuge, the refuge of the great poet of the new age; so that to-day,
beside the empty tombs of Galla Placidia and Theodoric, there stands
the great sarcophagus which holds the dust of Dante Alighieri.
We may well ask how it was that a city so solitary, so inaccessible, and
so remote should have played so great a part in the history of Europe. It
is to answer this question that I have set myself to write this book,
which is rather an essay in memoriam of her greatness, her beauty, and
her forlorn hope, than a history properly so called of Ravenna. But if
we are to come to any real understanding of what she stood for, of what
she meant to us once upon a time, we must first of all decide for
ourselves what was the fundamental reason of her great renown. I shall
maintain in this book that the cause of her greatness, of her opportunity
for greatness, was always the same, namely, her geographical position
in relation to the peninsula of Italy, the Cisalpine plain, and the sea. Let
us then consider these things.
Italy, the country we know as Italy, properly understood, is
fundamentally divided into two absolutely different parts by a great
range of mountains, the Apennines, which stretches roughly from sea to
sea, from Genoa almost but not quite to Rimini.
The country which lies to the south of that line of mountains is Italy
proper, and it consists as we know of a long narrow mountainous
peninsula, while its history throughout antiquity may be said to be
altogether Roman.
What lies to the north of the Apennines is not Italy at all, but Cisalpine
Gaul.

In its nature this country is altogether continental. It consists for the
most part of a vast plain divided