If we seek then
for some memory of Theodoric in this place we shall be disappointed.
Far otherwise is it with the great church, the noblest in Ravenna, of
S. Apollinare Nuovo. This was built about the same time as the palace,
in the first twenty years of the sixth century, as the Arian cathedral
by the Gothic king. It was the chief temple in Ravenna of that heresy,
and it remained in Arian hands till with the re-establishment of the
imperial power in Italy it was consecrated, in 560, for Catholic use
by the archbishop S. Agnellus. It consists of a basilica divided into
three naves by twenty-four columns of Greek marble with
Romano-Byzantine capitals. Of old it had an atrium, but this was
removed in the sixteenth century, as was the ancient apse in the
eighteenth. The original apse, however, was ruined in an earthquake,
as Agnellus tells in his life of S. Agnellus, in the sixth century,
and of the atrium only a single column remains _in situ_ before the
church. The campanile, a noble great round tower, dates from the ninth
century for the most part, its base is, however, new.
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