Day 14 - Ravenna

Today, we left Milan to go on our crazy fast tour of at least a city a day for the rest of the trip. Early this morning at 7:30, we got up and ready to go, and the tour bus that was going to take us to our new destination showed up and we packed in. We went on our way to Ravenna which was a four hour bus ride away. I took advantage of this time and slept and listened to my audiobook. It was really nice because I have not really taken too much time to relax. Since I am here in Italy for only a short time, I want to take full advantage of it, so it is good that I had this time that I couldn’t be doing anything else so that I could just rest. After we finally got to our destination, we headed to the hotel. The hotel that we have tonight is by far the nicest one that we have had. It has a nice big shower and bathroom with big towels. Everything seems so nice and I am hopeful of a good breakfast tomorrow morning.

First we went and visited the tomb of Dante the poet. We got to learn about him and his “Divine Comedy” from one of the students giving his presentation. It was interesting to learn that it is easier to rhyme in Italian than in English because of the endings of the words, so he could effectively have a complicated rhyming scheme in his poetry. Also learning about the different thoughts of the church on what heaven and hell were at the time was also intriguing.

We went out and toured Basilica di Santa Apollinare Nuovo. This was the first introduction we had into Byzantine architecture. 

This building was a combination of different styles, but Byzantine style was the most prominent. Byzantine architecture has a high usage of mosaics and tiles to decorate the interior and sometimes exterior of the building, and this was definitely evident here. This building was also interesting because of the fact that it was so poorly designed and/or constructed. The roof in the middle was caving in and the walls were weaving back and forth from too much weight in the middle. There were many columns with metal bands around them to keep them together and from buckling, two different types of vaults on the two side aisles around the nave, and you could physically see the walls deflected at the top of the building in the middle to the ends of it. 

Since Dr. Erdogmus is into restoration and rehabilitation of older buildings, it was cool that we all got to see this building, because she had not been to Ravenna before this trip either.

Then we went to Basilica di Santa Vitale which was also in the Byzantine architecture style, but probably more so than the previous one. This basilica was round in shape with decorations of mosaics everywhere along with the columns and had Byzantine characteristic construction materials (masonry construction). It was a very different feel than any of the other cathedrals or basilicas that we had been to before on this trip. 

The round shape with different levels to it made it feel a lot taller, even if it was not any taller than some of the other ones. It just felt like it went up instead of spread out in a cross shape, like most of them are. Getting to visit and see a completely different style helped a lot of us appreciate it more than I think we would have if we had just seen this at the beginning of the trip.

After we were finished there, we headed back to our hotel and relaxed until we headed out for supper. Most of us went to this kebab place that some of them had found earlier, and I was kind of skeptical about eating those while we were in Italy, but they were extremely good. Then I got some gelato and headed back to my room where I got caught up on some of the work I needed to do for this class and relaxed until it was bed time.