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Ravenna is
an interdisciplinary bilingual journal dedicated to the relationship between
the British Decadent movement and Italy. Its aim is that of bringing together
scholarly material devoted to the analysis of those British authors and
artists whose lives and works were influenced by Italian art, its soil,
people, history, its clime and light, its echoes. And vice versa. The choice of Ravenna
as a title is a statement of intent. Oscar Wilde’s poem, his first major
work, is a crucible of all of these elements. Within the city’s ancient
walls, “where Dante sleeps, where Byron loved to dwell”, Wilde watches the
“turquoise sky” turning to “burning gold”, the colours of the Ravenna mosaic
we have chosen as background for the journal. This represents the
barrel-vaulted ceiling of the Mausoleum of Galla Placidia, the earliest and
best preserved of all mosaic monuments in Ravenna. We like the ideas conveyed by both poem and
mausoleum: Ravenna as a place of rest, where readers and scholars can enter
the silent world gently recalled by Oscar Wilde in order to rebuild, like
mosaic tesserae, the image of Italy as conceived by the artists whose
imagination was nurtured by the country. |
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Return to the Ravenna hub page |
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