Ravenna: Oscar Wilde’s Byzantine Refuge - mosaics speak and poets listen
- Art - Culture - Tourism
- Aug 14
- 11 min read
Updated: Oct 2
By Patrizia Poggi
16 August 2025
Ravenna
In Ravenna, the stones whisper verses. Dante found eternal exile here; Byron ignited the myth of rebellion within its walls. But it was a twenty-three-year-old Irishman, Oscar Wilde, who grasped the city’s most secret soul—that of a "Queen uncomforted" whose splendour had not faded but lay intact beneath the patina of time, preserved in Byzantine mosaics shimmering with reflected light. Those golden tesserae were not mere decorations but cells of a hidden hive, where Ravenna had safeguarded its purest essence for centuries: art as nourishment for the soul.
It was 1877 when Wilde, fleeing Victorian greyness, composed his poem Ravenna here, winning Oxford’s prestigious Newdigate Prize for English verse. The poem already contained the seed of his genius: the ability to see beauty where others saw only decay.
Today, as then, Ravenna remains a crossroads for souls seeking refuge. This was evident in Professor Gabriello Milantoni’s recent lecture, "Ravenna - A new dawn: Oscar Wilde, Corrado Ricci, and Byzantium" at the Circolo dei Ravennati e Forestieri. Within the same walls that once hosted Byron "for love and dreams" and Wilde himself, President Giuseppe Rossi remarked with emotion:
"Here, Wilde found what England denied him, not just inspiration, but freedom. For him, Ravenna was what it had been for Byron: an act of poetic justice.".
Some lectures tell stories; others reveal souls. Milantoni’s - art historian, philologist, curator, novelist, and polymath - belongs to the latter. He does not merely describe; he conjures. With a poet’s sensitivity and a scientist’s rigour, he paints an unprecedented dawn for the city, where the gold dust of Byzantine mosaics blends with the ink of two seemingly distant geniuses: the multifaceted Oscar Wilde and the pioneering archaeologist Corrado Ricci.
Left - Palazzo Rasponi then Bellenghi, mid-16th century, home of Circolo Ravennati e dei Forestieri..
Photo credit: Paolo Santelmo
Right - Dr. Giuseppe Rossi,, President of the Circolo Ravennati e dei Forestieri, club founded in 1860
Oscar Wilde and Corrado Ricci: Ravenna as a shared muse. What binds these two spirits?
Oscar Wilde, 28 years old Corrado Ricci, 20 years old
By Napoleon Sarony, 1882, Wikimedia Commons/MET
Wilde and Ricci shared a love for the unfinished. For both, Ravenna—with its contradictions—was a laboratory of beauty and knowledge. Wilde, the poet, sang its soul; Ricci, the archaeologist, tended its wounds. Their work reveals the city as a living palimpsest, where every layer of history—Roman, Gothic, Byzantine—is not erased but transformed into art. Wilde captured its essence in Ravenna, celebrating its "sleeping majesty" rather than perfect monuments. Ricci redeemed its art through groundbreaking studies, proving that its stones "spoke Byzantine" in an Italy enamoured only with Rome.
Oscar Wilde in New York, 1882 by Napoleon Sarony Ravenna: recited in the theatre, Oxford, June 26, 1878 photographic print on card mount: albumen.
Library of Congress, Washington, USA
Wilde (1854–1900): The Irish nonconformist found in Ravenna a refuge from Victorian morality. To him, the city was a "living museum," where decay itself became art.
Ricci (1858–1934): A Ravenna native and controversial archaeologist, he dared to declare that "Ravenna’s Byzantine mosaics rival the Colosseum" amid a unified Italy’s Roman obsession.
The Grand Tour and lost mosaics: A journey that inspired the Oxford Newdigate Prize
Wilde arrived in Ravenna in spring 1877, completing the continental Grand Tour expected of young aristocrats. Yet he was no ordinary traveller—he followed in the footsteps of Shelley and Byron, whose names stirred the young poet’s soul. He came south, rejecting Neoclassical certainties for Ravenna’s "doubtful interiors," its drowsy streets still tinged with the Orient. Here, Wilde found what Rome could not offer: the privilege of witnessing history, not serving it. In its worn stones, he discovered the perfect metaphor for beauty outlasting glory—a theme central to his later work. For Wilde, Ravenna was a metaphysical stage where history became poetry.
Ravenna, the Orthodox Baptistery (or Neonian) between the Duomo and Arcivescovado Squares
Credit photo: Stuart Baird
On Saturday, March 31, 1877, the sunset welcomed him with vivid, melancholic hues:
«… And musing on Ravenna’s ancient name,
I watched the day till, marked with wounds of flame,
The turquoise sky to burnished gold was turned.
O how my heart with boyish passion burned,
When far away across the sedge and mere
I saw that Holy City rising clear,
Crowned with her crown of towers!—On and on
I galloped, racing with the setting sun,
And ere the crimson after-glow was passed,
I stood within Ravenna’s walls at last!».
The vision of Ravenna rising on the horizon, crowned with towers like a squalid queen. Wilde captures that fleeting moment when the vermilion glow of sunset fades as he passes through the city gates - a transition from light into history's shadowed quiet. This sunset becomes a metaphor for Ravenna's lost greatness. Not merely a picturesque image, but the twilight of an era. The same sun that sinks behind Ravenna's towers sets too on its identity as a capital, crushed between Byzantium, which abandoned it and the Papacy, which absorbed its voice without restoring it.
Ravenna paid dearly for being too Byzantine for the West, still nostalgic for Theodoric yet too Western for Byzantium, which sacrificed it in the 8th century. The post-756 silence became a kind of damnatio memoriae. The city lost its role as bridge between East and West, becoming instead a "political ghost" relegated to history's margins.
Basilica of Sant'Apollinare in Classe, Apse mosaic details
Ravenna, UNESCO World heritage site, Wichimedia commons
Oscar Wilde alone grasped its pathos. He saw what even Ravennates no longer perceived - not a dead city, but a heart still beating beneath history's rubble. This is why his poem remains, now more than ever, the most authentic love letter to Ravenna. It celebrates no single monument or era, but Ravenna's vital essence - its light and shadows, its landscape, its very breath. His "Queen uncomforted" is that perfect oxymoron uniting decay and nobility - a love complex, imperfect, and therefore truer.
Wilde’s Epiphany: "A year ago I breathed the Italian air..."
This is no mere descriptive opening, but an act of initiation. The young Wilde records not a journey, but a revelation. Ravenna became the epiphany of that inner Italy he sought. That "breathing" is no metaphor: it's a physical absorption of the spirit of place. Wilde doesn't say "I saw" or "I visited," but lets himself be permeated by the city's very essence - as if Ravenna's air, heavy with Adriatic salt, pine resin and mosaic dust, had transmitted to him a new poetic code. It was as though Ravenna whispered to him the secret of decadent beauty he would later develop in Dorian Gray. This was a spiritual encounter.
Wilde wasn't seeking monuments, but correspondence. Ravenna offered him glorious death: the mausoleums, Dante; sacred nature: the pine forest as cathedral; suspended time: Byzantine mosaics that arrest the light. He doesn't describe a city, but transfigures it into a state of mind. Ravenna wasn't a Grand Tour stopover, but the first station of an aesthetic pilgrimage. And that Italian breath - so young, so potent - became the first true act of the poet he would become.
The secret Resurrection: how two young men saved Ravenna
Some cities die twice - first when they lose their power, then when they lose their memory. Ravenna stood on the brink of both fates. Yet in 1877, an Irishman in a top hat and an archaeologist with a magnifying glass performed a secular miracle: they restored to Ravenna not its former glory, but its memory. Unknowingly, they signed a secret pact with history: Ravenna would live forever as a work of art.
The city forgotten after 756 AD was about to be rediscovered as a "new dawn" between East and West. Wilde captured its decadent beauty, Ricci unearthed its buried grandeur. Today the mosaics are a UNESCO World Heritage Site, but it was this unlikely pair - the dandy poet and the methodical archaeologist - who first revealed their true potential. As William Faulkner wrote: "The past is never dead. It's not even past."
The twenty-year-old Ricci, while sketching the pine forest, already dreamed of archaeological maps. Though they never met, their breathing the same Byzantine air in that fateful year became destiny's knot: art requires both visionary and cataloguer. Cities like Ravenna don't die when empires fall, but when dreamers cease to imagine them. Today that Byzantine heart still beats because two young geniuses conquered ten centuries of silence. The Irishman's poetic vision and the local scholar's
Corrado Ricci, Pine Forest of San Vitale near the cemetery
destroyed by frost in 1889-1890,Ravenna,
Classense Library, Ricci Collection
meticulous documentation together resurrected what time had nearly erased - proving that memory, when nurtured by both passion and precision, becomes immortality.
The Sacred Pine Forest: where mosaics and pines weave Ravenna’s soul
"« A year ago!—it seems a little time
Since last I saw that lordly southern clime,
Where flower and fruit to purple radiance blow,
And like bright lamps the fabled apples glow.
Full Spring it was—and by rich flowering vines,
Dark olive-groves and noble forest-pines...»
Right - Luigi Ricci, Pine forest with frost, photograph taken during the winter of 1879-80, which destroyed much of the pine forest, Ravenna, Classense Library, Ricci Collections
The verses mark the beginning of a new perception of Ravenna's great pine forest.Wilde did not call it majestic or silvered, but "noble", a revolutionary adjective for an era that saw it merely as economic timber to exploit. He transformed those trees into columns of a natural cathedral: "dark olive-groves and noble forest-pines" standing guard over the mosaics like sentinels of time.
With pencil in hand, Corrado Ricci traced their contours with scientific precision, while his father Luigi captured them in some of the earliest photographs. For them, documenting the pine forest was an act of love toward a neglected symbol: if the mosaics were Ravenna's golden heart, the pines were its lungs, breathing between East and West.
Wilde understood that without this green expanse, Ravenna would have been but a marble tomb. He described it as part of a Byzantine tapestry, where each pine needle was woven like a golden tessera. Today, as the wind caresses those boughs, the poet's words still echo: "Love only knows no winter" and the pine forest, like art, does not die.
The combined work of Corrado Ricci and Oscar Wilde reawakened the city's identity, proving that Ravenna's essence lay not only in its mosaics and monuments but also in its wild, luminous nature. Ravenna's modern rebirth began not through politics or economics, but through art. A foreign poet and a local visionary made the invisible visible again, binding the ephemeral beauty of landscape and architecture to the city's eternal history.
Corrado Ricci, Ravenna e i suoi dintorni, Ravenna, 1878,
Fratelli David Editor, Classense Library, Ricci Collection
Without them, Ravenna might have remained a forgotten relic. Instead, it became and endures as a living dialogue between earth and art, between pines and poetry. That Ravenna exists today, woven into our biographies and the grand narratives of Rome and Byzantium, we owe to two young geniuses: Oscar Wilde, a twenty-three-year-old Irishman from Dublin and Corrado Ricci, a twenty-year-old son of Ravenna.
Byzantine Mosaics at the Nave of the Basilica of
Sant ‘Apollinare Nuovo, Ravenna, UNESCO World heritage site
Wichimedia commons
Oscar Wilde’s “Ravenna”: the most beautiful love letter to a city
Some poems caress cities like a lover's hands. Wilde's ode to Ravenna is a Byzantine kiss - still burning after 150 years.
Milantoni is right. "Ravenna": no other city poem achieves such emotional intensity. Dante wrote of Florence with nostalgia, Baudelaire of Paris with fury, but Wilde embraces Ravenna in all its paradoxes. This is no celebration of power or beauty, but of a place's profound identity.
Let me say it once more: Wilde's "Ravenna" stands as the most beautiful love letter ever written to a city. It reads like words from one who loved deeply to the beloved itself - not describing a place, but breathing its very soul.
"Adieu, Ravenna! but a year ago,
I stood and watched the crimson sunset glow
From the lone chapel on thy marshy plain:
The sky was as a shield that caught the stain
Of blood and battle from the dying sun,
And in the west the circling clouds had spun
A royal robe, which some great God might wear,
While into ocean-seas of purple air
Sank the gold galley of the Lord of Light.
Yet here the gentle stillness of the night
Brings back the swelling tide of memory,
And wakes again my passionate love for thee:
Now is the Spring of Love, yet soon will come
On meadow and tree the Summer’s lordly bloom;
And soon the grass with brighter flowers will blow,
And send up lilies for some boy to mow.
Then before long the Summer’s conqueror,
Rich Autumn-time, the season’s usurer,
Will lend his hoarded gold to all the trees,
And see it scattered by the spendthrift breeze;
And after that the Winter cold and drear.
So runs the perfect cycle of the year.
And so from youth to manhood do we go,
And fall to weary days and locks of snow.
Love only knows no winter; never dies:
Nor cares for frowning storms or leaden skies
And mine for thee shall never pass away,
Though my weak lips may falter in my lay…"
[...]Adieu! Adieu! yon silver lamp, the moon,
Which turns our midnight into perfect noon,
Doth surely light thy towers, guarding well
Where Dante sleeps, where Byron loved to dwell."
Left - Portrait of Dante by Sandro Botticelli, 1495
Right - Byron portrait as painted in 1813 by Thomas Phillips, UK Government Art Collection
Contemporary Vibrations
Today, Ravenna is no "Queen uncomforted" but a phoenix risen from Byzantine ashes.
At the Ravenna Festival, Riccardo Muti’s "Roads of Friendship" choirs echo the "gentle silence" Wilde once heard whispering through the pines. Inside Palazzo Guiccioli, Byron's holograms lingers over love letters to Teresa Gamba, while Garibaldi’s marble bust murmurs Wilde’s verses - two exiles who found here what England refused them: freedom in beauty, beauty in freedom.
Right - Palazzo Guiccioli, Museo Byron, Credit photo: Stuart Baird
When Muti lifts his baton, the orchestra’s chords melt into words, answering Wilde’s longing:
«Love only knows no winter, never dies:
Nor cares for frowning storms or leaden skies…»
Maestro Riccardo Muti and the Luigi Cherubini Youth Orchestra
Like a Byzantine mosaic, every shard of history here finds its golden setting. Ravenna is not just a relic—it’s a covenant. For as Wilde declared, "The past is never dead"—and in these streets, where Dante’s shadow lingers and mosaics glow like frozen fire, Ravenna breathes it back to life.
Patrizia Poggi
Ravenna
This blog was published by Marysia Zipser, Founder of Art Culture Tourism & ACT Ambassador
Please feel free to share this article blog via social media icon links and/or write any comments or questions in the Comment Box below. Thank you..
Patrizia Poggi is ACT Advisor, a native of Ravenna and has 30 years in the forefront to enhance the Italian heritage, art and culture sector, she is an art consultant and gallerist, formerly resident manager of the Relais Villa Roncuzzi, member of the Association of Social Promotion “Taste Italy Aps”, Ambassador of Knowledge and Flavors of Italy for Italy&Friends in Florence. For a fuller blog on the cultural significance of Ravenna – please see Patrizia’s last ACT piece.
Gabriello Milantoni
From the age of 23 in 1973 and for decades thereafter, he served in Rome as Chief Curator of Artistic and Historical Heritage for the Colonna Princes of Paliano, overseeing both the Gallery and Archives of their palace. His work included cataloguing collections, directing restorations of paintings and frescoes, and studying the majority of entailed collections belonging to Rome’s noble families—including the Barberini, Barberini Colonna di Sciarra, Borghese Salviati Aldobrandini, Caetani, Odescalchi, Orsini, Torlonia, and others. Beginning in 1973 and for 24 years, he led a groundbreaking digital archiving project for the J. Paul Getty Museum’s Provenance Index in Malibu, collaborating with NASA to pioneer the digitization of Rome’s aristocratic archives as sources for art historical research.
A prolific scholar, he has authored monographic essays on artists from the 15th to the 20th century, including 17th-century masters such as Francesco Albani, Guido Cagnacci, Carlo Cignani, Michele Desubleo, Domenico Fetti, and Mastelletta. He has also curated catalogues for international exhibitions and museums, while continuing his research on the cultural and familial ties between Byzantine-Islamic East and Renaissance Italy—with a focus on the Malatesta dynasty.
Currently, he directs advanced art history training programs established by the John Jacob Astor Foundation (New York) and the Fondation Prince de Liechte (Geneva).
L to R: Corrado Ricci, The Mausoleum of Theodoric, 1898, Ravenna, Classense Library, Ricci Collection;
Corrado Ricci, Bas-reliefs and basins of the bell tower of the church of Sant'Apollinare Nuovo, 1898, Ravenna, Classense Library, Ricci Collection;
Corrado Ricci, Finds in the Bell Tower of the Church of Sant'Apollinare Nuovo, 1898, Ravenna, Classense Library, Ricci Collection;
Corrado Ricci, Finds in the Bell Tower of the Church of Sant'Apollinare Nuovo, 1898, Ravenna, Classense Library, Ricci Collection
L to R: Ravenna Pine Forest; Ravenna, Piazza del Popolo, photo credit: Stuart Baird; Ravenna, Dante's Tomb
L to E: Ravenna, Mausoleum of Galla Placidia, ceiling detail, UNESCO heritage; Ravenna, Mausoleum of Galla Placidia, ceiling detail, UNESCO heritage; Ravenna, Basilica of Sant'Apollinare in Classe, detail of the apse mosaic, UNESCO heritage
Links:
Comments