Ravenna is the odd one out in Italian history, a small flat city on the edge of the Adriatic that for a while was the capital of an empire. In 402 the Western Roman emperor Honorius moved his court here from Milan, because the marshes and lagoons around the town made it easy to defend, and for the next century and a half it passed through the hands of Roman emperors, the Ostrogoth king Theodoric, and then the Byzantines, who ruled Italy from here through an exarch. Each left buildings, and eight of them, decorated in dazzling mosaics, make up the Early Christian Monuments of Ravenna that UNESCO listed in 1996.
You can walk the whole set in a day, since the old centre is small and mostly pedestrian. The point of the mosaics is not their age so much as their colour. Gold, deep blue and green glass tesserae catch light from small windows, and the ceiling of the so-called Mausoleum of Galla Placidia looks like a night sky. Dante died here in 1321 after years of exile and is buried beside the church of San Francesco, so literary pilgrims arrive too.
The land is the surprise for riders. Ravenna once sat on the sea. Silt and a falling coastline have left it several kilometres inland, with pine forests near Classe and the Po delta's wetlands to the north, full of herons and, in winter, flocks of ducks. The ride into the Apennines from here is a classic. You cross the plain through Faenza or Brisighella, then the road starts to climb into the Tuscan-Romagnol Apennines. The Foreste Casentinesi with its Sasso Fratino strict nature reserve, one of Italy's oldest forests, lies on the other side.
Practically, leave the bike outside the restricted traffic zone and walk. Fuel is no problem in a city of eighty thousand, and the food is hearty Romagna cooking: piadina, cappelletti in broth, and sardines from the Adriatic. Be careful on the plain in winter, when fog and frost can combine on the flat roads, and in summer the mosquitoes are famous.