Archaeology in the New Pompeii

Abstract

Chapter 6 looks in more detail at the shrine’s attitude to the materiality of the local landscape. Bartolo Longo was fascinated by the geology and archaeology of the Vesuvian area, and when some Roman remains were discovered on shrine land in 1886, he initiated a season of archaeological excavations which lasted until May 1887. This project drew the Old and New Pompeii into a closer relationship than ever before; nevertheless, it was the shrine which had physical and ideological ownership of these ruins, as was made abundantly clear in the poems, articles, and festival celebrations which followed the discovery of the Roman building (interpreted as a fullonica—a Roman fullery, or laundry). We also visit the rose garden that was planted outside the shrine in 1886, and we examine a collection of poems that was published that year to mark the consecration of the throne and grand altar of the Madonna. The chapter ends with the inauguration of Pompeii’s new Meteorological-Geological-Volcanological Observatory in 1890, which had been built following a healing miracle experienced by the Vatican’s leading astronomer, and which enabled the continuous monitoring of the land, sea, and sky from a room in a tower above the shrine’s Female Orphanage.