The Ravennate Papyri are a documentation of 59 non-literary papyri, mainly in Latin, attesting to the economic activities and social networks of Ravenna, its Churches (Nicene and Ostrogothic), as well as other parts of Italy, from the V to the VIII century. They show clearly, with concrete examples, how the Church, in a more and more Christianised society, absorbed the wealth of society through donations and wills from the local upper classes, during the last war in Roman Italy between the Ostrogothic forces and the Eastern Roman Empire, where the Roman curia and its leadership in local public affairs were somehow preserved in Italy. However, the arrival of the Lombards in Italy in 568 meant that the established rule and order of the Eastern Roman Empire in the peninsula could only be reduced and reorganized. As the earliest document testifies, Constantinople established the exarchate system, with its headquarter in Ravenna, at least since 584, in order to maintain its partial Italian dominion. Under military rule, everything had to change, including the Church, which had to adjust its relationship with both the imperial authorities and with the new emerging Lombard royal power. The Ravennate Papyri, which contain 12 precious documents on donations to the Church from the VII century, illustrate the radical change in the sources of donations. Compared to the VI century, the social background of the donors, the number of testimonies, the formular of the archive and the use of honorary titles have all changed. The aim of this paper is to examine the Ravennate papyri of the VII century as a whole in order to see how the Church continues to receive income from society through donations, which helps us to better understand the social transformation in the VII century in the Exarchate of Ravenna and in so-called Byzantine Italy.