Ink and Roses

Abstract

Chapter 5 focuses on the year 1884, which saw the founding of a typography and printing press in Pompeii, and the inauguration of the shrine’s periodical The Rosary and the New Pompeii. The periodical was initially conceived as a ‘Journal of History, Religion and Archaeology’, and although it would later narrow its scope to cover purely religious affairs, the issues published in 1884 contained several noteworthy articles about archaeology, which allow us to reach a more nuanced understanding of the shrine’s attitude to the ancient history and geology of the terrain which surrounded it. The chapter shows how the shrine subtly positioned itself in relation to a persistent theme of anti-Catholic invective—that is, the idea that Roman Catholicism was simply being ‘paganism by another name’, or a thinly veiled form of goddess worship. It also introduces the important figure of Ludovico Pepe, the Puglian archaeologist who was appointed by Longo as the typography’s first director, and it reviews the accounts of the May 1884 feast day of Our Lady of Pompeii, which provide the clearest evidence for explicit conflict between the Catholic and archaeological sides of the city. The chapter closes with a discussion of the broader theme of temporality, and in particular Bartolo Longo’s restructuring of the experience of time in Pompeii, which I propose was one of his most profound and transformative interventions into life in the nineteenth-century valley.