Ravenna, located on the Adriatic coast between Venice and Rimini, was a site of significant power in Late Antiquity. One of the two permanent bases established by Augustus for the Roman navy was built there; around 400, the sedes imperii, the imperial residence, was moved from Milan to Ravenna; in the sixth century, the city was the capital of the Ostrogothic Kingdom and then of the Byzantine Exarchate in Italy. Each of these phases of its primacy was commemorated in impressive building campaigns. By the ninth century, Ravenna's power was a memory manifested in monuments. Charlemagne robbed the city's buildings for their symbolically potent spolia and the priest Agnellus wrote the city's last great early medieval text, the Liber pontificalis ecclesiae Ravennatis, a chronicle of the city's past greatness embodied in its buildings.

Despite Ravenna's prominence, no modern, scholarly survey of the city has been published in English. Edward Hutton's Story of Ravenna is a popular account. Its evocative introduction, however, perhaps suggests why the city was long neglected by Anglophone historians: Ravenna, tainted by the hoary sumptuousness of its Byzantine associations, was of interest only for its monuments. Serious monographs written in English on Ravenna, like Otto Georg von Simson's Sacred Fortress: Byzantine Art and Statecraft in Ravenna (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1948) and Spiro Kostof's The Orthodox Baptistery of Ravenna (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1965) have concentrated on its art.

Ravenna has received due attention from modern Italian and German researchers who have understood Ravenna's historical significance genealogically, as a kind of cultural womb “to which we owe everything and out of which we are come.” For some scholars Ravenna was central to the debate about which nation contributed most to the making of modern Europe. Ravenna, for example, played a crucial role in the Rom oder Orient (read: Roman vs. Aryan) debates between Rivoira and Strzygowski and their adherents at the beginning of the twentieth century. Elements of this debate were still traceable at the end of the century in the differences of opinion between German and Italian scholars such as Deichmann and Bovini. Both the Germans and the Italians have supported their claims with massive compendia on Ravenna and its monuments, notably Deichmann's multi-volume Ravenna, Hauptstadt des spätantiken Abendlandes (Wiesbaden: F. Steiner, 1969–1974) and the Fondazione Centro italiano di studi sull'alto Medioevo's two volumes, Ravenna: da capitale imperiale a capitale esarcale (Spoleto, 2005). Although rich in facts and dense in interpretation, neither of these works offers an accessible overview of the history of Ravenna.

Deliyannis's volume addresses the absence in any language of a current and serious synthetic account of the Late Ancient city. Ravenna is Anglophone not only in the language of its text but also in its approach to history. It is more empirical and less theoretical then continental history. Moreover, sustained by a pre-postmodern concern with objectivity, it is impartial to a fault. The author offers unbiased summaries of scholarly debates, broad and narrow. Characteristic is her analysis of different reconstructions of the Mausoleum of Theoderic: “Since ultimately we cannot know what was intended or what was built, we can only conclude that given the variety of models available to Theoderic and his architects, any one of the proposed reconstructions would have carried connotations of classical monumental tombs” (130). The chronological structure of the text is clear. The book is accessibly written and thoroughly illustrated with well-reproduced plans and photographs. Most importantly, Ravenna offers a political and religious history of the city that persuasively interweaves a sensitive understanding of its great monuments with a thorough knowledge of the relevant primary and secondary sources. Deliyannis has already demonstrated her control of art historical as well as ecclesiastical and political sources in her richly annotated translation of Angellus's Liber pontificalis (Turnhout: Brepols, 2006). That text offers a perfect companion volume to the book under review.

Deliyannis's Ravenna has none of the nostalgia of the Ruskinian descriptions of the great Late Ancient city found in Hutton. It is not a poetic conjuring of a lost moment misremembered as golden. It is, rather, a sustained and serious account of a significant site in Western history and culture. It is noted on the back of the dust jacket that “this volume provides an English-language entry point for the study of this fascinating city.” The blurb is too modest. After presenting its reader with an excellent introduction to Ravenna, the book will serve her as a formidable reference to the history of the city. Every student of Late Antiquity, Anglophone and any other -phone, should have a copy.