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yakalskovich) wrote2007-12-28 09:51 pm
yakalskovich) wrote2007-12-28 09:51 pm
Picture post: Ravenna
After my trip to Tuscany, to which my mother whizzed me off spontaneously in October 2005 because the friend who usually travels with her had broken her foot, I never got around to putting up proper picture posts. Meg and I had plotted that whole Andras/Eamon thing for Morningstar Manor while I was sitting in an Internet café in Florence, and I simply didn't feel like processing and posting hundreds of pictures.
But now, more than two years later, in view of my Milli!Teja's recent Ravenna OOM and especially the OOC discussion with![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
carolinw on that post, I am going to post a few pictures of Ravenna, at least. Looking up the pictures on my external HD (I had already archived them there without ever doing anything about them!), I realised that even then, I had seen and captured what I thought essential about that weird, weird place.
This is the basilica of San Vitale, built during the time in which Teja's canon takes place. Started a year after Theodoric's death, it was finished by the Byzantines; the mosaics inside are all Byzantine. Note the windows - many are still thinly sliced stone that let in the light but will not allow you to look out. Actual see-through glass windows are for modern day wusses. Not traditional Ravennate churches. Even the fierce Ostrogoths didn't put stones through the windows; so why not keep them? Like, forever. Things are forever, in Ravenna.
A typical quiet street in Ravenna. Note the unnatural tidiness, all the colours of the houses matching perfectly, the shiny, well-kept new cars parking happily out on the street, and the way people actually keep to the rules -- no parking where it has been crossed out! Also, note the large, very closed gates of all the houses.
The Neonian Baptistry, that is to say, belonging to the Catholic or Orthodox Christians of the time. Note the tidy fence, and the incredibly well-kept greenery and flowers. Green public spaces look like that anywhere in Ravenna. I suspect any young rebels or messy German art history students that would litter, or sit about, are discreetly taken aside and decapitated with an equally well-kept battle axe.-
A public building in Ravenna; it's some official office of whatever, and one suspects has been used as such since the days of King Theodoric, or at least Dante Alighieri (the other great figure associated with that city). Note how even here, something is 'in restauro', but partitioned off very neatly with a very neat building site fence. The taller building to the very left is the church that re-opened at three, but only for the Japanese TV crew, which the Ravennate ticket selling lady of course neglected to tell us -- we merely asked when the church would be open again, and she answered, so what? Volunteer information? No way.-
Another typical street in Ravenna, this one all brick, not plastered and painted. The bricks are flat and small, in the ancient manner -- even if not all bricks in the houses were fired under the reign of King Theodoric, why change things? That sort of bricks has always worked very well in the city, so who needs those newfangled large bricks that have come into fashion around, when was it, 1200 AD? One could just as well use AAC bricks! What a very disgusting idea.-
Some cloistered garden near San Apollinare Nuovo, the former palace church of Theodoric's palace (and the church in which most of the remembered part of that OOM takes place). I really took that picture for the big, impressive bush in the middle, which I think is acanthus. Everything is very well-kept again, and what with Ravenna being the way it is, you can imagine that not much would have changed since the time of the Ostrogoths. And even if everything has been changed since then, the way of doing things in Ravenna seems not to have been changed at all. Ever.-
But now, more than two years later, in view of my Milli!Teja's recent Ravenna OOM and especially the OOC discussion with
carolinw on that post, I am going to post a few pictures of Ravenna, at least. Looking up the pictures on my external HD (I had already archived them there without ever doing anything about them!), I realised that even then, I had seen and captured what I thought essential about that weird, weird place.This is the basilica of San Vitale, built during the time in which Teja's canon takes place. Started a year after Theodoric's death, it was finished by the Byzantines; the mosaics inside are all Byzantine. Note the windows - many are still thinly sliced stone that let in the light but will not allow you to look out. Actual see-through glass windows are for modern day wusses. Not traditional Ravennate churches. Even the fierce Ostrogoths didn't put stones through the windows; so why not keep them? Like, forever. Things are forever, in Ravenna.
A typical quiet street in Ravenna. Note the unnatural tidiness, all the colours of the houses matching perfectly, the shiny, well-kept new cars parking happily out on the street, and the way people actually keep to the rules -- no parking where it has been crossed out! Also, note the large, very closed gates of all the houses.
The Neonian Baptistry, that is to say, belonging to the Catholic or Orthodox Christians of the time. Note the tidy fence, and the incredibly well-kept greenery and flowers. Green public spaces look like that anywhere in Ravenna. I suspect any young rebels or messy German art history students that would litter, or sit about, are discreetly taken aside and decapitated with an equally well-kept battle axe.-
A public building in Ravenna; it's some official office of whatever, and one suspects has been used as such since the days of King Theodoric, or at least Dante Alighieri (the other great figure associated with that city). Note how even here, something is 'in restauro', but partitioned off very neatly with a very neat building site fence. The taller building to the very left is the church that re-opened at three, but only for the Japanese TV crew, which the Ravennate ticket selling lady of course neglected to tell us -- we merely asked when the church would be open again, and she answered, so what? Volunteer information? No way.-
Another typical street in Ravenna, this one all brick, not plastered and painted. The bricks are flat and small, in the ancient manner -- even if not all bricks in the houses were fired under the reign of King Theodoric, why change things? That sort of bricks has always worked very well in the city, so who needs those newfangled large bricks that have come into fashion around, when was it, 1200 AD? One could just as well use AAC bricks! What a very disgusting idea.-
Some cloistered garden near San Apollinare Nuovo, the former palace church of Theodoric's palace (and the church in which most of the remembered part of that OOM takes place). I really took that picture for the big, impressive bush in the middle, which I think is acanthus. Everything is very well-kept again, and what with Ravenna being the way it is, you can imagine that not much would have changed since the time of the Ostrogoths. And even if everything has been changed since then, the way of doing things in Ravenna seems not to have been changed at all. Ever.-
no subject
You've seen this link, right?
http://specgram.com/CXLVII.4/03.judzis.gothic.html
no subject
Nah, I hadn't seen that - it's fun!
no subject
You are lucky to have stuff to actually see in the landscape line. It must make writing the backgrounds so much easier.
no subject
There's one light and fluffy thread with Yrael, even, that's mostly just about the Tuscan landscape, and not much else, and completely lives from what I saw while looking out of the train window on our trip to and from Siena, while we were in Florence...