Since 1951, some wonderful mosaics of Ravenna have been touring the world thanks to the Exhibition of Copies of Ancient Mosaics. These are extremely faithful reproductions of the most beautiful mosaic figurations found in the early Christian and Byzantine monuments of the city.
The idea for this project was born in the 1950s and 1960s, during post-war restorations, when scaffoldings inside the monuments of Ravenna allowed restorers to get close to the mosaics. They were able to trace them with tracing paper, to precisely detect the shape of each tesserae and to minutely reproduce in watercolour the hue of the smalti , glass tesserae and marbles.

The restorers who carried out these survey are Alessandro Azzaroni, Giuseppe Zampiga, Libera Musiani, Sergio Cicognani and Ines Morigi Berti. The main objective was conservation, but the cartoons were also used at school to be brought back to the lime and serve as a guide for the young mosaicists, who made copies to train their hands on the shapes, sizes and patterns of the tesserae. Giuseppe Bovini, inspector at the Superintendency of Monuments in Romagna from 1950 and Director of the National Museum, together with Prof. Teodoro Orselli, then Director of the Academy of Fine Arts, had the idea of freeing the mosaics of Ravenna from the constraints of the walls to which they had originally been applied.

Thanks to their extremely faithful 1:1 scale copies, the Exhibition of the Copies of the Ancient Mosaics of Ravenna it was intended to allow the whole world to admire their splendour. This heritage comprises sixty panels of various formats, created between 1940 and 1960 by the Mosaicists Group of Ravenna. The exhibition debuted in Paris in 1951 and was a great success. Even today, the refined copies of ancient mosaics are regularly exhibited in the most important European and American cities, arousing ever greater amazement and conveying the great splendour of Ravenna’s history.