Ravenna

Ravenna is a small city that was once the center of the Western world, and it has the gold to prove it. Step into the churches here and the walls and ceilings blaze with Byzantine mosaics over 1,500 years old, the finest on earth, deep blue skies scattered with gold stars, processions of saints, an emperor and his court frozen in glittering glass. This was the capital of the late Roman Empire and then of Byzantine Italy, and that imperial splendor still sits in an otherwise modest, affordable city near the Adriatic. Dante spent his last years here and is buried here. Few places this small carry this much.