Ravenna Culture

Mosaic is not only Ravenna’s inheritance but a working craft. The city has mosaic schools, restoration workshops and practising artists, and the technique taught is the one used in the sixth century — glass tesserae set at deliberate angles so the surface catches light unevenly, which is why the originals seem to move as you walk past them.

Dante is the other presence. He finished the Paradiso here and died here, and the tomb is a small neoclassical shrine that Florence, which exiled him under threat of being burned alive, has never persuaded Ravenna to give up.

The Ravenna Festival, in June and July, brings opera and orchestral music into the basilicas and the open air, and performing inside these buildings is the point rather than a gimmick.

The food is Romagna rather than Emilia, and the difference is real: piadina, the flatbread cooked on a griddle and folded around squacquerone cheese and rocket; cappelletti in broth; grilled Adriatic fish on the coast; and Albana, which in 1987 became the first Italian white wine to be awarded DOCG.