Ravenna wasn’t on the list. It was a day trip from Ferrara — somewhere to fill a morning before we got the train back north. We almost didn’t go. It could end up being the place that changes everything.
We stepped off the train, walked out of the station, and within ten minutes we were standing in an empty cobbled square with a fifth-century baptistery in front of us and café chairs around it, and nobody else there. No tour groups. No queues. No one with an umbrella on a stick. Just the building, the cobbles, and the two of us.
That was the first thing we noticed. The size of it — and the quiet.
The mosaics
People tell you Ravenna’s mosaics are something. They are not wrong, but the word doesn’t quite prepare you. Inside San Vitale the gold catches light in a way that feels almost physical — not decorative, but present. You stand and stare longer than you planned to.
But the mosaics aren’t just in the churches. They’re on the street signs — each one a small ceramic panel, the street name rendered in the same tradition that’s been here since the fifth century. And someone, somewhere in this city, has made a Space Invader out of mosaic tiles and stuck it on a wall on Via Boccaccio, about four feet above a road sign that also has a mosaic panel. Two thousand years of craft, one very good joke.
We tried to spot every mosaic street sign we passed. We missed some. We went back for a few.
Underground
The Domus dei Tappeti di Pietra — the House of Stone Carpets — is underneath a church, underneath the modern city. You go down steps and you’re standing on Roman floors from the fourth and fifth century. Not behind glass. Not elevated on a walkway. On the actual floor, inches from figures and animals and geometric patterns that people walked on sixteen hundred years ago. It is one of those moments where time does something strange and you can’t quite find the words for it.
A quiet moment
Inside one of the churches — we’d lost track of which one by this point, which tells you something about Ravenna — Sarah went quiet. Her mum Linda died of bowel cancer at 53. Her brother Anthony at 34. Her grandfather John too. Three people, same disease, one decade. She found a candle, donated what she wanted to donate, and lit it. We stood there for a while. The church was empty.
Some cities give you space for that. Ravenna did.
The right size
By the afternoon we were sitting outside Gelati Allegri on a cobbled side street — one pink, one wild berry and cream — and talking about what it would actually be like to live here. Not as a fantasy. As a conversation.
The streets are clean without being sterile. The colours on the residential buildings — greens and yellows and ochres with blue shutters — feel genuinely lived in. There are bikes everywhere and hardly any tourists and the Piazza del Popolo functions like a real town square rather than a photo opportunity. It felt like a city that hadn’t decided to perform itself for visitors.
We walked back to the station. On the train to Rimini that evening, we weren’t talking about the mosaics or the Roman floors or the gelato.
We were talking about whether we’d just found where we were going to live.
Ravenna, Emilia Romagna – 5.01 miles – 2hrs 04mi – 78ft – 8,330 Steps.