Baptistery of Neon

The Baptistery of Neon is the oldest surviving building in Ravenna — built in the late 4th or early 5th century as a baptismal chamber for the city's early Christian community. It is a small octagonal structure, and its interior is covered from floor to dome in mosaic decoration that is among the finest of the period.

The central mosaic in the dome shows the baptism of Christ: John the Baptist pouring water over Jesus, with the River Jordan personified as an old man reclining nearby. The procession of apostles around the drum below carries garlands and moves with a stately rhythm. The colours — gold, blues, greens — have retained their intensity over 1,600 years.

The building sits slightly below the current street level, a reminder of how much the ground has risen around it over the centuries. The descent into the baptistery creates a sense of entering a different time, which the ancient mosaics overhead reinforce. This is one of Ravenna's most intimate UNESCO monuments — the scale is human rather than imperial, and the quality of the work is exceptional.

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Carl Jung visited the Baptistery of Neon in the 1930s and had what he described as a paranormal experience — a vision or hallucination that he later linked to his theories about the collective unconscious. He wrote about it in his autobiography, and the baptistery has since become a site of interest for Jungian scholars alongside its rather more mainstream status as a UNESCO World Heritage monument.

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