We arrived in Ravenna at lunchtime and were warmly welcomed to Hotel Diana with cappuccino and cake. Here we should note that potable coffee was found in Bologna and is also good here, so patience is rewarded on that score. The hotel is pleasing in every way except that the wifi signal was very wan and soon expired , so we are reduced to descending to the lobby.
The hotel also supplied us with a pamphlet that explains why we have come, so I will save time by directly photocopying the introductory pages.
The Ravenna we can still see owes its several well preserved and enriched buildings to emperor Honorius' establishment of the civil administration of the Western Empire here in 401. Galla Placidia was his sister. Ostrogoth king Theodoric captured the city in 493, and added to the civic glory. The revered Byzantine general Belisarius took the city in 540, and emperor Justinian and his empress Theodora then further sponsored erection and magnificent internal decoration of public buildings. The mosaics inadvertently illustrate the clashes of Christan philosophical concepts, with first Arianism then Orthodoxy (both distinguishable from later Roman ideology) in the ascendant.
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