Christmas around Italy

James and I wanted to have a relaxing holiday over Christmas/New Year. We went to a travel agent here in town and looked into some options. When it became clear that our idea would cost a lot of money and not give us exactly what we wanted, we decided to take matters into our own hands and plan our own trip.  Well, we kept adding onto it, and adding onto it, and it became an odyssey around Italy by car.  We started our trip by driving from Desio to Rimini, on the Adriatic side of Italy. 

RAVENNA 
While staying in Rimini, we went to Ravenna, which is famous for its mosaics, many of which date back to the 4th and 5th centuries, A.D.

 Mosaic in a small chapel. You can't see the individual tiles very well here, but they were about 1/4 by 1/4 inches in size. Pretty spectacular, incredibly detailed, and the golden ones are gold!

Top of the cupola in one of the churches in Ravenna...all mosaic.

Church walls were decked out in marble. Pretty neat.

 Luca was in a bad mood; he wanted to see the beach.  We did too, but unfortunately, there was a thick fog bank on the water and we couldn't see it!  He just didn't understand the comparison between ancient mosaics and playing in the sand!

 Top of the ceiling in a baptistry in Ravenna.  Remember, mosaic! I like how they managed to make the water look transparent...pretty cool.

 In one of the churches in Ravenna, most of the mosaics were made before the rule of the Catholics. When the Catholic sect began to take power (and churches) in the 5th, 6th centuries, they decided to destroy and replace any of the mosaics that were not important to them.  This picture of the Emperor Justinian was not offensive to the Catholics, so they left it. Originally, he had been surrounded by mosaics of other important leaders.

 This mosaic at one time had important people peeking out from the curtains. The Catholics decided that those people didn't fit into their world-view, so they just replaced the people with black tile mosaic.  You can see evidence of this cover-up by noting that one of the columns in the middle has a "floating hand" on it...no longer attached to its owner!

This is another baptistry that was astoundingly beautiful on the inside.  All the gold was GOLD, and it was just breathtaking.

Ravenna is also where Dante's Tomb is located (it's in the background of this photo). As you probably know, Dante Alighieri wrote the "Divine Comedy." The oil for the lamp which burns continually in the tomb is supplied by the city of Florence, from which Dante was exiled, as penance for sending away such a great contributor to Western literature. 


All in all, Ravenna was really neat.  Norah enjoyed it; Luke and Susannah were too young to appreciate it. But we are glad we got a chance to see it!