Basilica di Sant'Apollinare Nuovo

From the street, Ravenna's Sant'Apollinare Nuovo keeps a plain brick face; inside, two shimmering processions of saints advance the length of the nave towards Christ on one wall and the Virgin on the other, in the longest continuous mosaic narratives anywhere from late antiquity — a parade you can walk beside, at eye level.

Why it matters

This is the palace church of Theodoric, built between 493 and 526 as the basilica of his Gothic court, and it preserves the most complete early mosaic decoration of any Ravenna monument: unlike Sant'Apollinare in Classe, whose apse ensemble is the masterpiece, here the entire nave walls survive, upper band to lower. UNESCO lists it among the city's eight monuments and reads in it the meeting of Roman tradition and Byzantine influence under the Gothic kingdom. Its walls also record an act of political erasure — figures of Theodoric's court deliberately scraped away after the Byzantine reconquest — which makes the basilica as much a document of propaganda and damnatio memoriae as of art. Historians of early Christian imagery treat its processions as the founding example of the type.

What to notice

• The lower band: on one side a line of male martyrs marching from the city of Classe towards Christ; on the other, female martyrs advancing from the palace towards the Virgin enthroned, with the three Magi kneeling in the Persian proskynesis reserved at court for emperors.
• The gold-brick facade of the Palatium with its colonnaded loggia, and — look closely — disembodied hands still visible in some columns' interstices: traces of the Gothic court figures removed after 561, replaced with curtains.
• The upper band of Christ's life, thirteen miracles and parables on the left wall, Passion scenes on the right: a young, beardless Christ works the miracles, a bearded Christ carries the Passion — the operator explains the bearded type as a Western sign of mourning.
• The middle register of prophets between the windows, crowning the whole wall like a golden ceiling in miniature.
• The seaside city of Classis rendered in bird's-eye view on the same band — Ravenna's port, which this catalog treats separately as the Antico Porto di Classe.

Context and history

Consecrated as a palatine basilica under Theodoric, the church originally served the Arian court, with its cathedral and baptistery nearby. Around 561, after Justinian's officials restored Catholic orthodoxy, it was reconsecrated and dedicated to St Martin of Tours — the operator connects the nickname "Gold Heaven" to its shining ceiling — and the figures of Theodoric's court were removed from the Palatium facade. Only in the mid-ninth century, when pirates made Classe unsafe, were the relics of Ravenna's first bishop transferred here; the church took his name and the adjective "Nuovo" to distinguish it from the old basilica out in Classe. The apse mosaics collapsed or were lost between the seventh and eighth centuries, which perversely directs all attention to the nave walls that survived. Since 1996 the basilica has been part of the UNESCO serial property.