Agnellus gives us a fairly full account of this church, which consisted of five naves divided and upheld by four rows of fifty-six[1] columns of precious marble from the temple of Jupiter. That the church was approached by steps we learn from Agnellus in his life of S. Exuperantius, for he there tells us that Felix the patrician was killed "on the steps of the Ecclesia Ursiana." Both the vault and the walls were adorned with mosaics,[2] which Agnellus describes and which would seem to have covered then or later the whole of the interior; the wall on the women's side of the church being decorated with a figure of S. Anastasia, while over all was a dome "adorned with various coloured tiles representing different figures." When Agnellus wrote (ninth century) this great church was of course standing, but doubtless it had been added to and adorned from century to century, and it is impossible to learn from his description, or indeed any other that we have, what was due therein to S. Ursus and what to his successors. One of the most splendid ornaments the church possessed would seem to have been a ciborium of silver, borne by columns which stood over the high altar also of silver. This is said by Agnellus to have been placed there by the bishop S. Victor, who seems to have ruled in Ravenna from about 537 to 544. It is said to have cost, with the consent of Justinian, the whole revenue of Italy for a year and to have weighed some one hundred and twenty pounds. The whole stood in the midst of a circular choir of marble, itself covered with silver it might seem, if we may believe a chronicler of Vicenza of the fifteenth century, quoted by Zirardini,[3] who says: "In the great church of Ravenna all the choir, the altar, and the great tabernacle over the altar are of silver." Before the altar was the Schola Caniorum.
[Footnote 1: Fabri, however, in his Sacre Memorie, says there were forty-nine columns.]
[Footnote 2: Agnellus gives the names of the mosaicists Euserius or
Cuserius, Paulus, Agatho, Satius, and Stephanus.]
[Footnote 3: Zirardini, De Antiquis Sacris Ravennae Aedificiis.]
Agnellus tells us further in his life of S. Felix (c. 693) that that bishop built a Salutatorium (? Sacristy), "whence the bishop and his assistants proceeded at the Introit of the Mass into the presence of the people." But the Epigram which Agnellus quotes from this building would seem to suggest that the salutatorium was rather then rebuilt than added for the first time to the church.
The magnificent basilica, one of the most splendid in Italy, was sacked by the French in April 1512, but, as Dr. Corrado Ricci says, it was not they who destroyed the church itself, but the accademici of the eighteenth century, who, instead of conserving the glorious building, then some thirteen hundred years old, began in 1733 to pull it down, to break up the beautiful capitals and columns of precious marbles, and to make out of the fragments the pavement of the new church we still see, begun in 1734 by Gian Francesco Buonamici da Rimini. Only the apse with its beautiful great mosaic remained for a few years till at last it too was destroyed.
Thus the church we have in place of the old Basilica Ursiana is a building of the eighteenth century, and all that we care for in it is the fragments that are to be found there of its glorious predecessor.
These are few in number and of little account. Supporting the central arch of the portico are two marble columns which belonged to the old basilica, and by the main door are two others of granite which came perhaps from the old nave.
Entering the church we find ourselves in a cruciform building consisting of three naves, divided by twenty-four columns of marble, transept, and apse, with a dome over the crossing. In the second chapel on the right is an ancient marble sarcophagus said to be that of S. Exuperantius, bishop of Ravenna about 470. The magnificent tomb carved in high relief did not, however, belong to the old cathedral, but was brought here when the church of S. Agnese was destroyed. In the south transept is the chapel of the Madonna del Sudore, where on either side are two other sarcophagi of marble adorned with figures and symbols. That on the right is said to be the tomb of S. Barbatianus, confessor of Galla Placidia, and was originally in the church of S. Lorenzo in Caesarea, whence it was brought to the cathedral in the thirteenth century by the archbishop Bonifazio de' Fieschi, whom Dante found in Purgatory among the gluttons:
"Bonifazio che pasturo col rocco molte genti…"