Museo Nazionale di Ravenna

The Museo Nazionale di Ravenna is the city's principal state museum, in Emilia-Romagna, occupying the cloisters and conventual buildings of the former Benedictine monastery of San Vitale, immediately beside the famous basilica and the Mausoleum of Galla Placidia. Its wide-ranging collection grew from monastic and antiquarian holdings and now spans late antiquity, the Byzantine era, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance, complementing the early Christian mosaics for which Ravenna is renowned. Among its most important holdings are early Christian and Byzantine works that reflect Ravenna's role as an imperial and exarchal capital: ivory carvings including pieces associated with episcopal furnishings, fragments of frescoes and transennae, and a notable group of late-antique sculpture. The museum preserves detached fresco cycles by Pietro da Rimini from the church of Santa Chiara, important examples of 14th-century painting, as well as collections of ceramics, bronzes, arms and armour, coins, and Roman and Byzantine epigraphy. A celebrated section gathers liturgical and devotional ivories and a series of bishops' artefacts, while the so-called Veli di Classe, rare painted textile fragments, are among the more unusual survivals. The Renaissance cloisters themselves, with their arcaded walks and lapidary collection of inscriptions and architectural fragments set into the walls, form part of the visit. The curatorial arrangement is broadly chronological and thematic, moving from antiquity through the Byzantine and medieval rooms to later material, and the setting within the monumental complex of San Vitale lets visitors combine the museum naturally with Ravenna's UNESCO mosaic monuments. As a national institution it provides bilingual interpretation and forms part of the route that explains the city's exceptional late-antique heritage.