Spolia e riuso di materiali tra la tarda antichità e l’alto medioevo a Ravenna

The elevation of Ravenna as a new Imperial capital, at the beginning of the 5^th century, determined a redefinition of the housing space and the creation of new buildings destined for the Court and for the display of the Imperial power. In this extensive urban renewal programme, materials and structures of the earlier Roman city came to be consistently reemployed. Reuse of tiles and architectural material was considerable, due to economic reasons and the necessity for immediate or rapid provision of necessary materials and structures for the Imperial bureaucracy. The re-employment of ancient materials (spolia) was so vast that most of the buildings of the previous Roman city were demolished and destroyed – even the larger public monuments. Temples, the area of the Forum, buildings for the administration and the civil basilica were all completely absorbed and turned into the Late Antique urban fabrics, without leaving any material evidence. In this contribution we will consider spolia as a material of common use involved in this process of transformation of an ancient city into a Late Antique one. The main goal is to show that in this operation of spoliation of the past and the reuse of building materials during the Late Antiquity there was no ideological intention – unlike the strategic use of spolia in the form of statuary and architectural works employed at Constantinople to identify this as the new symbolic capital of power.