Mosaics Galore!

This weekend our entire class took a 2-day trip to Ravenna. Ravenna is a city in northern Italy where Caesar had his seat while in Gaul. Later, it became the capital of the Western Roman Empire (opposite Constantinople in the East). Also, it's where Dante was originally buried. Obviously Ravenna is a very important city for many periods of history. Which brings me to my question- why had I never heard of it before last week? History fail!
We left for Ravenna on Friday afternoon and with all the snow and what-not, got there at about 8, just in time for dinner. After dinner we explored the city for a bit, which was not terribly exciting because at 10 PM on a Friday everything was closed and no one was out...
Saturday was a mosaic-filled day. We walked over to the Ravenna museum and through there entered the basilica of San Vitale, an early Byzantine church. The mosaics in there were like nothing I've ever seen. Some of them looked like actual paintings-unbelievable that they were made of little stones!!

Jesus and some bishops

Funny random story about the little stones- they're called 'tesserae', which is also the word used in the Hunger Games for something completely different. So, this weekend I was both looking at mosaics and reading the Hunger Games, and I did not make the connection that it was the same word. When I finally did, it cleared up why that word was in my brain ALL THE TIME. Anyways...

After San Vitale and the nearby Mausoleum of Galla Placidia, which held more amazing mosaics, we walked down to the Neonian Baptistry. Again, amazing mosaics. Unfortunately my pictures from there are a bit too blurry to be blog-worthy, but they'll be on facebook! After seeing that the Arian Baptistry we were going to see was closed off, we went to another museum and saw a really cool ivory chair carved with scenes from Jesus and Joseph's lives (random?). Finally we went to the basilica of San Apollinare Nuovo, where we saw these amazing mosaics.

I had to just pick one- the magi

Later that day, after lunch, we saw the Mausoleum of Theodoric, one of the conquerers of Ravenna, and then went to Sant'Apollinare in Classe, another basilica with wonderful mosaics (sensing a theme...), and pretty marble columns that are 'the best marble you will ever see'. There, we did our first practice autoptic, in which we had to sketch the building in multiple ways, including details and measurements by paces. I thought it was a lot of fun, which is a good thing since the next ones will be graded... 

After a riveting Saturday night, we left Ravenna bright and early Sunday morning. We crossed the Rubicon, which was as exciting as Ravenna on a Friday night ('oh... Umm, I think we just crossed the Rubicon guys. It might have just been a puddle though'). On our way back to Rome, stopped at Rimini and Fano, two small northern towns with Augustan arches. Terribly exciting. At Fano we happened upon a Carnevale parade (Carnevale is basically the two-week Italian equivalent of Mardi Gras), which meant there were a lot of street stands selling gummies that we could buy. 

The best moment on the bus ride back to Rome was my waking up from a nap to our art history professor rambling on about the Mines of Moria and the Fellowship of the Ring, and seeing this out the window:

Far over the Misty Mountains cold... NERD

Things got a bit weird when another professor joined in and I heard snippets of 'THE BALROG!' 'Gandalf, no!!' and 'Run, Frodo, run!'...

We also passed through a long tunnel in the mountains which apparently houses a famous astrophysics lair. (I say lair, because it is underground, and all science that happens underground happens in lairs). After dropping our art history professor off at the side of the road in his mountain town, (he sees that view every single day...), we stopped at a magical gas-station where I bought this:

Addie modeling the Kinder

Then we headed back to Rome to do all the homework we put off during the weekend. And now I am going to take a nap because I'm falling asleep while writing this!