One comes to this great basilica always I think as to a ruin, to find without surprise the doors closed and only to be opened after long knocking.  The round campanile that towers and seems to totter in its strange dilapidation beside the church is so beautiful that it surprises one at once by its melancholy nobility in the midst of so much meanness and desolation.  It is a building of the ninth century, and may well have been used as much as a watch tower as a bell tower.  Till recently it had at its base a sacristy, but this has been swept away.  Of old the church too had before it a great narthex of which certain ruins are left, among them a little tower on the left.

Within we find ourselves in a vast basilica divided into three naves upheld by twenty-four marvellous columns of great size and beauty, of Greek marble, with beautiful Byzantine bases and capitals.  The central nave is closed by a curved apse set high over a great crypt thrust out beyond the rest of the church.  Beyond the two aisles are two chapels each with its little curved apse.  The walls of the church and the walls above the arcade were undoubtedly originally covered, in the one case with splendid marbles, in the other with mosaics.  The walls of the church were, however, stripped in 1449 by Sigismondo Malatesta of Rimini when he was building, or rather encasing, the church of S. Francesco in Rimini with marbles, and turning what had been a Gothic church of brick into what we know as the Tempio Malatestiano, by the hands of Alberti.  We know that a great quantity of marble of different kinds was gathered by Sigismondo from all parts of Italy, not only to furnish the interior of his Tempio, but to cover the exterior also according to the design of Leon Alberti.  Even the sepulchral stones from the old Franciscan convent of S. Francesco in Rimini were used and the blocks which the people of Fano had collected for their church.  S. Apollinare in Classe was then in Benedictine hands.  With the consent of the Abate there, very many ancient and valuable marbles were torn from the walls and carried off by Sigismondo to Rimini; so many in fact that the people of Ravenna complained to the Venetian doge Francesco Foscari, saying that Sigismondo had despoiled the church.  The doge, however, seems to have cared nothing about it and Sigismondo sent to Ravenna and to the Abate two hundred gold florins, so that both declared themselves satisfied.  Then the church passed to me, these three sheep belong rather to the upper part of the mosaic which, with the Cross in the midst, bearing the face of Our Lord, and on either side Moses and Elias, symbolises the Transfiguration.  These three sheep would thus represent S. Peter, S. James and S. John.

[Illustration:  INTERIOR OF S. APOLLINARE IN CLASSE]

[Illustration:  CAPITAL FROM S. VITALE]