Mausoleo di Galla Placidia

The smallest of Ravenna's UNESCO monuments may be the one travellers remember longest. Behind the Basilica of San Vitale waits a plain brick cruciform chamber whose interior blazes with fifth-century mosaics: apostles, drinking stags, a martyr hurrying to his death, and a night-blue vault scattered with golden stars around a conquering cross.

Why it matters

Commissioned in the first half of the fifth century, after 426, by Galla Placidia, the Mausoleum is among the oldest standing buildings in Ravenna and carries the earliest complete mosaic cycle of the group inscribed by UNESCO in 1996. Its decoration stands at the hinge between the classical and Christian worlds, and its star-studded cupola fixed the image of Ravenna for centuries of visitors. Nearly every surface above the marble dado carries tesserae, and the compressed space draws the eye toward the star-studded cupola.

What to notice

At the centre of the cupola a golden Latin cross shines in a field of stars, ringed by the four Apocalyptic living creatures that stand for the Evangelists. Along the lunettes, apostles in pairs raise an acclimating hand between doves drinking from fountains, while stags bend to water in the east and west lunettes, echoing the psalm of the soul that thirsts for God. Above the entrance waits the most famous panel: Christ as the Good Shepherd, seated among his sheep in a landscape of rocks and green. Opposite, Saint Lawrence strides toward his gridiron, carrying the cross of victory. Note, too, what the building is not: three marble sarcophagi stand empty, and the whole interior is dimmed by original alabaster windows that give the gold its warmth.

Context and history

Galla Placidia was daughter of Theodosius the Great, sister of the emperor Honorius and mother of Valentinian III, for whom she ruled as regent in Ravenna. Her mausoleum began as the closing bay of the narthex of the church of Santa Croce, from which it was physically separated only in 1602. It never served its intended purpose: the empress died in Rome in 450 and was buried there, probably in the family tomb, so the three sarcophagi in Ravenna have never held her remains or those of her brother and husband. Subsidence, the slow sinking of Ravenna's soils, has left the building about a metre and a half below its original level, behind a large plane tree at the edge of the San Vitale complex. UNESCO inscribed it with the other early Christian monuments of the city in 1996, describing its mosaics against a dark blue ground as an expression of the Western Roman tradition.