Praying with Ruins

Abstract

Chapter 4 focuses on the period from 1876 to 1883—key years that saw the first reported apparition of the Madonna of Pompeii, the completion of the church’s exterior, and the composition of the famous devotional texts and prayers to Our Lady of Pompeii, including the Fifteen Saturdays of the Most Holy Rosary (1877) and the History, Prodigies and Novena to the Most Holy Virgin of the Rosary of Pompeii (1878). The ancient site appears prominently in these works, as well as in other contemporary sources such as letters, prayer cards, and sermons. From analysing these early sources, it becomes clear how far already in this period the relationship between the shrine and the archaeological site had begun to crystallize around ideas of triumph, contrast and the ‘anchoring’ of devotion—with the amphitheatre appearing as particularly prominent and functioning as a metonymic symbol for the site as a whole. Longo’s writings in this period also show how he adopted and creatively remixed earlier strands of Christian tradition, like the long visual tradition of representing the nativity against a background of ancient ruins and the triumphant Marian discourse which developed after the 1571 Battle of Lepanto, when the Pope attributed the Christian victory over the Turkish forces to the intervention of Our Lady (Maria Victrix). In combining these two quite distinct Marian traditions and anchoring them firmly into the Campanian landscape, Bartolo Longo gradually fashioned a new identity for this new Pompeian Madonna.