Rávena

A trip to the city that was the cultural engine of the Byzantine Empire, the hidden jewel of the Adriatic. In the year 402 AD. After invading tribes crossed the Alpine borders and threatened the Western Roman Empire, the young Emperor Honorius moved the capital, hitherto Milan, to a small but easily defended city on the Po Estuary. Since then, and until the year 751 d. C., Ravenna was the cultural and political center of northern Italy and the Adriatic region. Scholars, lawyers, doctors, artisans, cosmologists and religious settled within its walls, making the place the main axis between East and West. Judith Herrin, one of the world's leading experts on Byzantine studies, takes us on a journey through history between the 5th and 8th centuries, marked by the Gothic and Lombard invasions, the settlement of Christianity and the appearance of Islam, to explain the decline of the Roman Empire for the splendor of Byzantium. As he traces the lives of Ravenna's rulers, its chroniclers, and its inhabitants, Herrin shakes a host of preconceptions: Late Antiquity was not a dark period of darkness and strife, but one of the greatest splendor and creativity of the history. Today the palaces of Ravenna are just ruins, but its churches have remained standing and in them spectacular mosaics resist, a living legacy of a bygone era that marked Europe forever. Illustrated with lavish photographs and based on the latest archaeological discoveries, Ravenna brings the early Middle Ages to life through the city's dazzling history.