Undoubtedly the greatest monument which the sixteenth century has left us in Ravenna is the church of S. Maria in Porto. This was built by the Canons Regular of the Lateran, the most ancient community of canons still extant, in the year 1553, when for about fifty years they had been compelled to abandon the church of S. Maria in Porto fuori outside the city, in the marsh. They not only furnished their new church, but to a considerable extent built it, out of the materials of S. Lorenzo in Cesarea, which they thus destroyed.
[Illustration: Colour Plate PORTA SERRATA]
S. Maria in Porto as we see it has suffered from restoration, and the facade is a work of the eighteenth century, but the church itself remains a noble sixteenth-century building divided within into three naves by huge pilasters and columns and covered at the crossing with a great octagonal cupola. There is, however, little that is very precious to be seen, a few fine marbles and the beautiful marble relief of the Madonna in prayer in the transept, called the Madonna Greca, a Byzantine work probably brought to Ravenna, according to Dr. Ricci, at the time of the crusades. It was originally in S. Maria in Porto fuori. The noble choir should also be noticed and the beautiful ciborio.
Close by the church is the Monastero of the Canons, within which there remains the lovely cloister which should be compared with those at S. Vitale and S. Giovanni Evangelista of the same period. This of S. Maria in Porto, however, is the finest, having doubled storied logge. Above all the exquisite Loggia del Giardino should not be missed. It was built in 1508, and looks on to a piece of the sixth-century wall of Ravenna.
Not far away in the Via Girotto Guaccimanni near the Hotel Byron is the church of S. Maria delle Croci, founded in the tenth century, but entirely rebuilt in the sixteenth. The rose in terracotta of the facade is a work of this time, as is the exquisite baldacchino over the high altar within, upheld by two pilasters and two columns of Greek marble. The picture, too, of the Assumption over the altar is by a master, perhaps Gaspare Sacch' of Imola, of the sixteenth century. Of the same period is the massive Porta Serrata at the north end of the Corso Garibaldi.
The best monument of later times left in Ravenna is the fine Palazzo
Rasponi in Via S. Agnese (No. 2) built in or about 1700.
XIX
THE GALLERY AND THE MUSEUM
Ravenna isolated in her marsh and altogether, both geographically and politically, out of the Italian world that began to flower so wonderfully in Tuscany, then in Umbria, and later still in Venice in the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries, is the last city in which to look for pictures. Nevertheless a few delightful pieces among much that is negligible are to be found in the Accademia delle Belle Arti in the Via Alfredo Baccarini. The collection was begun about 1827, and though what is to be seen there is never of the first importance it is certainly more than we had the right to expect.
The first two rooms upon the upper floor are devoted to the Romagnuol and Bolognese painters, the best of them here pupils or disciples of the one master Ravenna can boast, Niccolo Rondinelli.