"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.
Posted by Diogo Oliveira
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