Basilica of San Vitale

The church was raised over the shrine that held the tomb of Saint Vitalis, on the site where legend places his martyrdom, though accounts differ over which Vitalis that was. Work began under Bishop Ecclesius while Ravenna was still ruled by the Ostrogoths, in 526 by one account and 532 by another. It was paid for by Julian Argentarius, a local banker who financed the nearby Sant'Apollinare in Classe at about the same time and who may appear among the courtiers on the Justinian mosaic; the final cost came to 26,000 solidi, the equivalent of 16.38 kg of gold. Little else is known of him, beyond a suggestion that he came from the eastern part of the empire. Building was finished some twenty years after it began, under Archbishop Maximian, by which time Ravenna had been retaken by Justinian I, and Maximian consecrated the church on 17 May 547.

The central vault was built with a western technique of hollow tubes fitted one into another in place of bricks, the first recorded structural use of terracotta forms; the capitals were carved at Byzantium, and both local and eastern workmen are thought to have built it. The ambulatory and gallery were vaulted only later, in the Middle Ages.

The two panels at the foot of the apse walls, one showing Justinian I with Bishop Maximian, the generals Belisarius and Narses and the palatine guard, the other the empress Theodora with her court women, were completed in 547. Maximian is the only figure marked with an inscription, which has prompted the suggestion that he supervised the work after being appointed the first archbishop of Ravenna; the later insertion of his name suggests that the mosaic may have been altered in 547, replacing a portrait of Victor, bishop of Ravenna. One scholar has argued that Theodora was depicted after her death in 548, but that has not been widely accepted against the evidence that the mosaics were finished by the consecration in 547. Hers is the only certain image of the empress.

The bell tower is a partial eighteenth-century rebuilding of an earlier campanile that was badly damaged in the earthquake of 1688; it carries four bells, the tenor of them dating from the sixteenth century. Between 1778 and 1782 Serafino Barozzi, Ubaldo Gandolfi and Jacopo Guarana painted the Baroque frescoes on the dome. Further tremors on 17 July 1781 brought down part of the presbytery vault.

In October 1960 Pope John XXIII raised the church to the dignity of a minor basilica. The Mascioni organ in the matroneum was built in the same year, has been played by Karl Richter and Marcel Dupré among others, and serves the annual San Vitale international organ festival. Since 1996 the basilica has been inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List as part of the serial site of the Early Christian Monuments of Ravenna, one of eight structures in the city on that list, and it is held as Italian national heritage. Some 124,000 visitors come to it each year.