Ravenna’s Mosaics, Heaven Comes to Earth

A few weeks ago, I promised a sea-to-shining-sea series from Los Angeles to Portland, Maine, and then to the Adriatic. I did indeed get stuck — gross negligence at the Kennedy Center and, wouldn’t you know it, Theodore Roosevelt — but I’m determined to reach across mountains and oceans, and now we’re, more or less, at the Adriatic, in Ravenna. Now a small city, Ravenna was once the last capital of the western half of the Roman Empire. Unlike Rome, it faced Constantinople. Unlike Rome, it was hard to invade, surrounded as it was by swamps. It was in ...