The Anglo-Italian Runner
Via Cavour · September 2025
Our next chapter
It wasn’t on the itinerary. It was a day trip — somewhere to fill a morning before catching the train back north. We almost didn’t go. We’ve been trying to leave ever since.
In a few weeks, we stop trying. We’re moving here.
The city nobody knows
Most people who visit Italy walk straight past Ravenna on the map. It sits quietly in Emilia-Romagna, between Bologna and the Adriatic coast, without the fame of Florence or the spectacle of Venice. That is precisely why we fell for it.
Turn a corner here and you find a fifth-century baptistery being used as the backdrop to a café terrace. Ancient brick and café tables. The everyday laid against the extraordinary, and nobody making a fuss about it. That is Ravenna.
A residential street, ten minutes from the centre · September 2025
Beyond the postcards
We walked this city for a day. Then we came back and walked it again. The centro storico is compact enough to know well on foot — piazzas that open unexpectedly, streets of green and ochre and terracotta, a red Fiat parked outside a house that could be any century from the last ten.
No car hire. No tourist bus. Just shoes on cobblestones, getting properly lost and finding something better than what we were looking for. That is how we travel. It is how we will live here.
Eight UNESCO sites. One city.
The reason Ravenna carries eight UNESCO World Heritage Sites is the mosaics — fifth and sixth century works of such startling colour and precision that they stop you mid-sentence. But the thing that caught us wasn’t the famous basilicas. It was finding a contemporary mosaic artwork bolted to a brick wall on an ordinary street corner. The tradition never stopped here. It just kept going.
Domus dei Tappeti di Pietra — Byzantine floor mosaics beneath the city
Detail, 3rd century — still vivid beneath your feet
The detail that gets you
It is the small things, in the end. The flower beds kept immaculate outside an ancient gate. The ironwork somebody polished before breakfast. The sense that people here are proud of their city in a quiet, unshowy way — not performing it for visitors, just living it.
That is what made us stop looking at other cities. Ravenna felt, from the very first day, like somewhere that would let us belong.
On the runner
Our first proper day in the city — on foot, unhurried, ending with gelato and a candle lit in a basilica we nearly missed.
See all walks →With Sarah
Sarah knows this city through her feet. Small-group, English-language tours of the mosaics, the streets, and the places most visitors never reach.
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