Ravenna is one of the most important western European cities with many examples of early Christian churches and ‘Byzantine’ artworks. Eight monuments of the site are on the UNESCO World Heritage List, all dating between the fifth and sixth centuries, a period when the city was certainly one of the main ports of the Mediterranean. D. knows this city as well as any historian, having provided a new Latin edition of the ninth-century Liber pontificalis ecclesiae Ravennatis (‘Book of Pontiffs of the Church of Ravenna’) by Andrea Agnellus (2006) and an English translation of it (2004), which includes a study of the text, exploring the bishop's literary models and sources and explaining its structure. That work has been fundamental for the writing of this new volume, which will be a very important resource for English-speaking readers, giving an idea of the construction of the identity of the city and explaining shifting perceptions of Ravenna as a capital, first Imperial, then Ostrogothic, then Byzantine. More notably D. provides a carefully researched and richly documented study that guides her reader through analytical studies of Ravenna, much of it inaccessible to non-Italian readers.

After a short analysis of the historical context D. goes directly to the description of the main monuments of the city and ably mixes written sources and art-historical analyses. In her description, Ravenna shines as a ‘testament to the splendor of the Christian Roman Empire in its early centuries’ (p. 1).

Her engagement with archaeological sources, however, is somewhat lacking; and this is unfortunate given numerous recent projects in the area. For D., Ravenna is poorly connected to its territory. We know, however, that when Emperor Honorius (a.d. 402), chose this small Adriatic city of the Western Roman Empire as an Imperial see and transferred the court from Milan to Ravenna, the entire region was brought along with the city in a surge of economic and cultural growth. Archaeology demonstrates that fact clearly, including the recent excavations and survey conducted by the University of Bologna, in the territory of Ravenna, and by the University of Venice Cà Foscari, around Cesena.

The relocation of the capital from Northern Italy to the Adriatic coast was probably occasioned by defensive needs, and thus the defence of the new capital would have been a worthy subject of examination, as well as how the move might have reshaped imperial commerce. Archaeological excavations of the last decade demonstrate that especially Constantinople and the Eastern Mediterranean, but also North Africa's coast, were well connected to Ravenna and that the city became in this period a centre of redistribution for North Italy. D. skims over the archaeological remains of the city-walls and the port and focusses instead on the public monuments so well described by Agnellus, which she argues created the identity of the late-antique capital.

The religious buildings more than other remains are the subject of this book. D. argues that step by step these buildings announced the imperial presence in this late-antique capital. She describes these in their architectonical aspects, with clear drawings and some schematic maps of the city divided into chronological phases (a.d. c. 200; 480; 530; 600; 840). Good-quality pictures show the wonderful mosaics and marbles of these buildings, which are rightly key monuments of ‘Byzantine’ Art History.

An important chapter is dedicated to the Ostrogothic Kingdom and to Arianism. Theoderic's Arian church was based at Ravenna which preserves the most Arian buildings of the Late Roman World. At Ravenna, there were three different bishops' palaces, the main close to the Anastasis Gothorum, with baths, a private chapel and a baptistery dedicated exclusively to Arians. For D., Theoderic is central to the status that the city achieved. He definitively made this city a capital of his kingdom and he seems mostly to have stayed at Ravenna. Anyone who wanted to meet the king, then emperor, no matter his status, origin or rank made the journey to Ravenna.

D. is decisively attentive to the question of later modifications of the Theoderician mosaics, a matter that makes discussions of their interpretation extremely difficult. She provides hypothetical interpretations of compositional programmes, as in her thoughtful analysis of the original iconographic scheme of S. Apollinare Nuovo. Arian figures originally portrayed on the south wall of the great church, which was built close to the Imperial residence, probably where Odoacer was brutally killed, were ‘erased’ a century later, during the Byzantine ‘reconciliatio’. Only images of their hands were left intact – most likely to remind future audiences that dissenters had once challenged Orthodox views and lost. In this instance, she offers new insight into the potential meaning of the one of the city's major monuments, and how that meaning changed over time.

D.'s late-antique Ravenna is the city described by Agnellus and with particular attention the buildings still standing in his day and, to a lesser degree, in our own time. For this reason she includes a map of the city in the ninth century, a period from which very little remains. D. has navigated the complex forest of historiographical literature from the origins of Ravenna, and she has reproduced the prejudices of that historiography: we see a city of churches. Such was the idea that many Renaissance antiquarians had of this city: ‘Ravenna has wonderful mosaics and basilicas, but there is so much mud on its roads that you can't even walk’, wrote the humanist Ambrose Traversari in 1433. I might argue that the history of this town now needs an archaeological approach, with new excavations and new data that might help historians and others to understand the longue durée of this capital, a city which was made by houses, roads and infrastructural investment and not only by churches and palaces.

D.'s book is in fact a great step forward in the understanding of the complex dynamics of urban development and helps to underline the role played by Ravenna as an Imperial seat and as a capital of the west. Her focus on the major monuments greatly increases our knowledge and interpretation of them. D. condenses many decades of modern interpretation and reaches a definitive goal allowing historians, art historians and students of any discipline to differentiate between various hypotheses and the real existing data. This is a valuable contribution when the field of Ravenna studies is so deeply stratified and ambiguous; D. has at last made it much clearer.