The Lay of the Land

Abstract

This chapter aims to orient the reader within the Valley of Pompeii, by giving a more detailed picture of the physical and religious layout of the area and its historical development. It takes the reader on a tour around a number of earlier Christian sites in the Valley, from the medieval church of SS. Salvatore (‘the Most Holy Saviour’) down by the Sarno River, to a nineteenth-century chapel that was imagined—but never actually built—near to the Roman temple of Venus within the excavations. Since some of these earlier Christian sites were located inside the walls of the ancient city, the chapter also addresses the earlier history of interactions between the Catholic Church and the Pompeian archaeological authorities, which formed part of the context for Bartolo Longo’s work in the later nineteenth century. It shows how already in the eighteenth century the ancient site was being co-opted into narratives of Christian progress and redemption, at the same time as being a locus of exchange and collaboration between the Catholic Church and the academic field of archaeology.