ade of the art of Greece and thrust perhaps for ever
upon Europe. Here we are free from the overwhelming common-place of
Roman art, its mediocrity and respectable endeavour.

It is, however, not in the gorgeous mosaics alone that we find the
delight and originality of S. Vitale. The whole church is amazingly
different from anything else to be seen in Italy, for it is altogether
outside the Roman tradition, an absolutely Byzantine building as well
in its construction as in its decoration. It must be compared with the
later S. Sophia and SS Sergius and Bacchus of Constantinople. These,
however, are works more assured and more gracious than S. Vitale, and
yet in its plan at least S. Vitale is a masterpiece, and altogether
the one great sanctuary of Byzantine art of the time of Justinian that
we have in the West. Every part of it is worthy of the strictest and
most eager attention, from the ambulatory, which was covered in 1902
with old marble slabs and where there are two early Christian
sarcophagi, to the restored Cappella Sancta Sanctorum with its
fifth-century sarcophagus, the tomb of the exarch Isaac, and the lofty
_Matronaeum_, the women's gallery, from which the best view of the
mosaics and the marvellously carved Byzantine capitals may be had. Nor
should the narthex be forgotten, mere skeleton though it be. It is
characteristic of such a church as this, and set as it is obliquely to
it, is original in conception and curious.

When we have finished with S. Vitale it is well to leave Ravenna and
to drive by the lofty road over the marshes to the solitary church of
S. Apollinare in Classe which was built also by Giuliano Argentario
for archbishop Ursicinus (535-538) and was consecrated by archbishop
Maximianus in 549.

Classis, Classe, as we know, was the station or port of the Roman
fleet, established and built by Augustus Caesar. It was doubtless a
great place enjoying the busy and noisy life of a great port and
arsenal and possessed vast barracks for the soldiers and sailors of
the imperial fleet. Later even when disasters had fallen upon that
great civilisation it maintained itself, and from the fifth to the
seventh centuries we hear of its churches, S. Apollinare, S. Severo,
S. Probo, S. Raffaele, S. Agnese, S. Giovanni "ad Titum," S. Sergio
_juxta viridarium_, and the great Basilica Petriana.

It was joined to the city of Ravenna by the long suburb of the Via
Caesarea, much I suppose as the Porto di Lido is j