Last weekend, I went with the school to Pietrasanta, Carrara, and Ravenna. Pietrasanta is home to a community of artists and craftsmen, and it has been famous for centuries for the marble and bronze sculptures that artists have created there. We watched modern workshops create sculptures and mosaics and learned to judge the types and quality of marble and bronze. We also visited Carrara, which is better known than Pietrasanta and has been an important marble production center since the ancient Romans began quarrying there thousands of years ago. Michelangelo selected his marble from those quarries, and the demand for Carrara marble is still strong, especially in newly wealthy countries. As people continue to quarry there, the mountains are always changing shape and slowly shrinking. Some people believe that there is a thousand years worth of marble left, but few believe that. Moreover, modern technology has allowed quarrying not only on the surface but engineers can remove massive blocks of marble from the heart of the mountain itself. We traveled to these inner mines through an old train tunnel and found gigantic caverns where marble had been subtracted block by block from the mountain. In them, engineers, heavy equipment, and semis work, cutting and removing the marble in perfect geometric blocks. As a result, these chambers are beautifully minimalistic and with four hundred meters of stone above and below them sublimely unsettling. Our guide was an older Italian gentleman who told how during World War II, when the Allies were bombing the industrial zone of Carrara, many of the town's families would sleep in the caves. It would so quiet that they could not hear the planes above or the bombs exploding in the valley. There are pictures in the Facebook album "Carrara".
The next day, we traveled over the Apennines to Ravenna in the Emilia-Romana region. In the 5th and 6th centuries, as the Roman empire decayed and fell prey to invasion, Ravenna was a strategic city for Italy's various rulers, specifically because its rich land and Classe, its Adriatic port, which connected it to the Eastern Roman Empire in Constantinople. Western Roman emperors, Ostrogoth kings, and emperors from Constantinople won and lost this city, building monuments to Christ during the time they held it: San Appolinare in Classe, San Appolinare Nuova, Santa Placida, San Vitale, the Battistero di Neoniano. Many of the buildings are in form basilica or cruciform, which are cheap to construct even on a grand scale. San Vitale was particularly beautiful; it is an example of how architecture can shape space to the point that it begins to seem mystical, which was the point. The emperor, Justian, who never in fact visited the church, and the clergy were the only people allowed in the center of the church, emphasizing Justian's place in the great chain of being, the emperor who connects his rule with the rule and will of the Lord. Circulating through the side aisles, laymen gleaned broken views of the clergy and rituals through massive piers encrusted with sheets of marble that gave a Rorschach effect. Even today, dim light enters through hidden windows, and the mosaics of the high chapel catch and refract it into shimmering views of kings, saints, Christ, and paradise. San Vitale is truly one of the world's most beautiful buildings.
Besides visiting the churches, we paid homage to Dante at this grave. Florence has built a tomb for him in Santa Croce and wants his bones, but Dante's life ended in Ravenna, specifically because Florence exiled him. There are pictures in the Facebook album "Ravenna".
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