How Was Ravenna Built

Ravenna’s churches look like almost nothing from the street. They are bare brick, unfaced, often squat, with small windows. That is not decay or later stripping: the exterior was never meant to compete. Everything was spent inside.

San Vitale, consecrated in 547, is octagonal rather than basilican — a central plan with an ambulatory and galleries, closer to Constantinople than to Rome, and a direct ancestor of Charlemagne’s chapel at Aachen. Its apse mosaics show Justinian and Theodora with their courts, neither of whom ever came here.

The Mausoleum of Galla Placidia is the opposite of grand: a small cruciform brick building whose interior is entirely covered in mosaic, with a barrel vault of gold stars on deep blue. Alabaster in the windows gives it the light it was designed for.

The Mausoleum of Theodoric is the odd one out and is not mosaic at all: a two-storey stone tomb roofed with a single carved block of Istrian limestone weighing around three hundred tonnes, which nobody has fully explained how they placed.