Basilica di Sant'Apollinare in Classe

Stand at the door of Sant'Apollinare in Classe and the whole building works on you at once: two rows of pale marble columns pulling your eye down the nave to a single explosion of green and gold, where the founder-bishop of Ravenna stands with his arms lifted in the apse while the Transfiguration turns to light above him.

Why it matters

UNESCO lists this basilica among the eight monuments of the Ravenna inscription and the building is a major surviving example of an early Christian basilica: a facade thirty metres tall, a nave of twenty-four Proconnesian marble columns, and an apse mosaic that many art historians rank as the finest single composition of early Christian art. Built between 533 and 549 over the cemetery where Ravenna's first bishop, Apollinaris, was believed buried, it was financed like San Vitale by the banker Julianus Argentarius and consecrated under Archbishop Maximian in 549. Its detached cylindrical bell tower, added in the ninth century, became the landmark of the Classe countryside.

What to notice

• The apse programme: a jewelled cross on a star-strewn sky, the face of Christ bearing the Alpha and Omega inside it, the hand of God above, Moses and Elijah at the sides, three sheep beneath — the Transfiguration — and below it all, Saint Apollinaris in the ancient orans prayer stance in a paradise of rocks, trees and birds.
• The twelve white lambs emerging from the meadow towards the saint: the apostles, and with them the church of Ravenna itself.
• The acanthus capitals of the nave columns, carved so the leaves seem ruffled by wind — the detail T.S. Eliot singled out in a 1920 poem.
• The marble sarcophagi of archbishops ranged along the aisles, and the presbytery with its sixth-century inlay.
• The exterior simplicity: plain brick, a single tall facade, the round bell tower — the contrast that makes the apse detonate on arrival.

Context and history

Classe was the harbour district of Roman and Byzantine Ravenna, home to the imperial fleet and, in late antiquity, among the busiest trading ports of the Mediterranean; the basilica rose beside its cemetery roads around the tomb-veneration of Apollinaris, the first bishop, sent according to tradition from Antioch. Bishop Ursicinus commissioned the building (533–536), Julianus Argentarius paid for it, and Archbishop Maximian consecrated it on 9 May 549. As the port silted and the city of Classe emptied in the early Middle Ages, the great church stood increasingly alone in fields — which is why it survives so little altered. The ninth-century translation of Apollinaris's relics into Ravenna gave its name to the "new" basilica in town, and this one kept the old one. UNESCO included it in the 1996 inscription as the final monument of the serial property, noting its imposing forms and rich marbles and mosaics.