Anchoring Devotion in a Layered Terrain - Bartolo Longo and the Sanctuary of the Blessed Virgin of the Rosary in Pompeii
Abstract
In this essay I introduce my ongoing research project on the Catholic sanctuary of the Blessed Virgin of the Rosary in Pompeii, Italy. Focussing on the writings of the sanctuary’s founder, Blessed Bartolo Longo (1841-1926), I explore how far early devotion at Pompeii was anchored within the local terrain – a complex, enchanted landscape made up of multiple layers, both historical and geomorphological. I indicate how Longo and his collaborators drew on the symbolism of these different layers to help shape the identity of their nascent Catholic sanctuary, and how certain localities within the Valley of Pompeii became part of a rich ‘legendary topography’. Finally, I start to think about how the many international devotees of this Italian Madonna have developed material techniques for connecting with the deeply sacred landscape of the Pompeian Valley.
Abstract in Italian
In quest'articolo presenterò il mio attuale progetto di ricerca sul Pontificio Santuario della Beata Vergine del Santo Rosario di Pompei. La mia analisi si focalizzerà principalmente sui testi del fondatore del santuario, il Beato Bartolo Longo (1841-1926). Investigherò come inizialmente la devozione nel santuario di Pompei aveva forti radici nel paesaggio locale - un luogo estremamente stratificato geologicamente ma anche storicamente. Mostrerò come Longo e i suoi collaboratori si ispiravano al simbolismo di questa stratigrafia per scolpire e sviluppare l'identità dello santuario nascente, e come alcune località nella Valle di Pompei diventavano parte di una ricca 'topografia leggendaria'. In conclusione discuterò come tanti devoti internazionali di questa Madonna italiana hanno gradualmente sviluppato riti basate su manufatti che si connettono con il paesaggio profondamente sacro della Valle di Pompei.
Citation: Hughes, Jessica. “Anchoring Devotion in a Layered Terrain - Bartolo Longo and the Sanctuary of the Blessed Virgin of the Rosary in Pompeii.” The Jugaad Project, 13 Oct. 2019, thejugaadproject.pub/anchoring-devotion-in-a-layered-terrain-bartolo-longo-and-the-sanctuary-of-the-blessed-virgin-of-the-rosary-in-pompeii [date of access]
Figure 1: Front cover of a devotional leaflet containing the Italian text of the Supplica (‘Petition’) prayer to the Blessed Virgin of the Rosary of Pompeii (Our Lady of Pompeii). The image is a close copy of the painting in the Pompeii sanctuary. Photo by author.
For Italian Catholics, very few places are more important and beloved than the Sanctuary of the Blessed Virgin of the Rosary of Pompeii. Often dubbed ‘the Italian Lourdes’, this church in the southern Italian region of Campania attracts more than four million pilgrims every year – popes, politicians and celebrities among them. Reproductions of the miracle-working painting of ‘the Madonna of Pompeii’ can be found in homes and churches all over Italy, as well as in diaspora communities across America, Canada, and Australia [1]. This image of the Madonna and Child handing rosaries to St Catherine and St Dominic is one of the most instantly-recognisable scenes of Italian Catholic visual culture; it is found propped up on bedside-tables, etched into roadside shrines, hanging in side-chapels in provincial churches, and stuck onto the windscreens of cars, buses and motorcycles.
Although Pompeii has many things in common with other nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Marian pilgrimage sites such as La Salette, Lourdes and Fátima, in other ways this Italian sanctuary is entirely unique. One of its most significant features is the deep history of its surrounding landscape. For it stands just a few hundred metres from the excavations of the ancient Roman town of Pompeii which was buried by the eruption of Vesuvius in 79CE. In fact, one of the best views of the Roman city’s amphitheatre can be enjoyed from the shrine’s grand bell-tower, which rises up to the north-east of the archaeological excavations. Today the two populations of visitors (archaeological ‘tourist’ and religious ‘pilgrim’) rarely cross paths, but this belies the fact that the ‘Two Pompeiis’ have a long and fascinating history of interaction.
Figure 2. Photo taken from a window of the archives in the Pompeii sanctuary, looking over the ‘Piazza Bartolo Longo’ towards the Monte Lattari. Photo by author.
In this short essay, I contemplate how far devotion to this Catholic Madonna is anchored within the local terrain. Using and testing ideas of anchoring, layering, and The Jugaad Project’s key theme of ‘Material Religion in Context’, I explore what this landscape meant for the earliest devotees as a means of situated and sited ‘enchantment’ – not only those who were present in the Valley of Pompeii in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but also those who lived in more distant places. Having read Ratu Saraswati’s essay about land, art and identity in West Java, I will pick up on some of her thoughtful points about how visual (and literary) representations can shape our experiences and expectations of landscapes – and of everything that happens within them. After introducing the concept of ‘layeredness’ as a way of understanding the Valley of Pompeii, I will examine how some of the local historical and geological features were drawn on by the sanctuary’s founder, Blessed Bartolo Longo (1841-1926). And I will end with some reflections on what happens to concepts of the Vesuvian landscape when the Madonna of Pompeii (or ‘Our Lady of Pompeii’) travels into other regional and national contexts, taking on new material forms and meanings.
Antiquity and ‘layeredness’ as ways of approaching landscapes
Elsewhere on The Jugaad Project website, David Morgan has written about how ‘religions are ways of fabricating networks of relations among human beings, on the one hand, and relations with gods, angels, saints, the afterlife, spirits or ancestors, nationhood, destiny, or providence, on the other.’ This concept of religion as a ‘dual reticulation’ resonates with many accounts of Bartolo Longo’s life, which describe his mission in Pompeii in the dual terms of carità (‘charity’) and fede (‘faith’). On the one hand, Longo was committed to strengthening relationships with the divine, particularly via the thaumaturgic image of the Madonna of Pompeii (Fig. 1). On the other hand, he worked to create bonds between people, building an entire new town around the sanctuary – a ‘New Pompeii’ which had charity and community at its core. His Orfanotrofio Femminile (‘orphanage for girls’) was opened in October 1887, the same year that the new marble ‘throne’ of Our Lady was solemnly consecrated (this ‘throne’ was an ornate architectural frame for the painting in the centre of the church). Later, he would build two homes for the children of prisoners – one for boys (1892) and one for girls (1922), as well as safe and comfortable housing for the workers who were making the new city. As the New Pompeii attracted growing numbers of pilgrims and residents, Longo added a railway station, printing press, post office and many other amenities, thus forming the infrastructure of the modern town that radiates out from the sanctuary building.
How did all these sacred and charitable building projects impact upon the landscape of the valley of Pompeii? How were they shaped by a consciousness of its antiquity? How did Bartolo Longo himself perceive the unique historical and geological features of that landscape, and how did he communicate that vision to his collaborators? These are some of the questions that I am addressing in my current research project, which has the working title Religion and Memory in the Valley of Pompeii. Central to my project is the concept of ‘layeredness’ – that is, of the historical, mythological and geological stratification of the Pompeian valley, as well as its inhabitation by ‘spectral presences’ (to borrow a phrase from Simon Coleman’s work on the similarly-layered shrine of Walsingham in England) [2]. Bronze age inhabitants, Greek colonisers, Etruscan settlers, Samnites, Romans and medieval Christians – all these communities and eras left their marks or ‘traces’ on the area around Pompeii. The place also had a deeper mythological history: some Greek and Latin writers, for example, trace Pompeii’s name to the word for ‘procession’ (pompe/pompa), suggesting a link to the ancient hero Hercules who processed victorious through Campania after defeating the monster Geryon and stealing his cattle (Hercules’ tenth mythical labour). In turn, all these historical and mythological narratives unfolded within a landscape that was itself conspicuously stratified. The 79CE eruption of Vesuvius alone had deposited layers of white and grey pumice which were interwoven with ash layers of pyroclastic surge and flow deposits; these Roman layers are sandwiched between earlier and later strata which include green pumice-fall, fluviatile sands, gravel, yellow-brown volcanic ash and dark brown mudflow [3].
Figure 3. ‘Pompei sintesi di antico e moderno’ by Claudius R. Karl, currently on display in the entrance hall of the archives (the ‘Archivio Bartolo Longo’). This is a reconfiguration of the famous Roman painting from Pompei, the so-called ‘portrait of Terentius Nero’. Behind the sanctuary dome is the monumental bell-tower, which was dedicated by Bartolo Longo in 1925, the year before his death. This painting is one of many reminders of Pompeii’s antiquity which can be found around the Catholic sanctuary. Photo by author.
The Catholic sanctuary’s founder Bartolo Longo was fascinated by the different temporal scales and strata of his ‘new’ city, and by the multiple trans-historical dialogues that were unfolding around him. By the time he arrived in Valle (as the area around the modern town of Pompeii was then known), the neighbouring Roman town had been undergoing systematic excavation for more than a century, and – in the 1880s and early 1890s at least – Longo paid close attention to his ancient Roman neighbours. Early editions of the sanctuary’s monthly journal (entitled Il Rosario e la Nuova Pompei - ‘The Rosary and the New Pompeii’) contain accounts of the latest archaeological discoveries, as well as reports on volcanological research on Vesuvius and the nearby Phlegraean Fields. And in 1887, Longo’s friend and collaborator, Ludovico Pepe, published a significant new historical survey of the valley, Memorie Storiche dell’Antica Valle di Pompei [Pepe 1887]. These different accounts of the area’s layered history and geomorphology enabled Longo to draw connections and contrasts with his own building projects, and to use the antiquity of the Pompeian valley to help shape the identity of his nascent Catholic shrine.
Over the last few years, I have been spending time in the sanctuary examining the large collection of ex-votos and other objects, while also accumulating data from the rich archive of books, magazine and diaries. One particularly important source is the monthly journal mentioned above: Il Rosario e la Nuova Pompei (henceforth RNP). Between 1884 and 1926, Bartolo Longo authored many of the monthly editorials of the RNP, providing detailed accounts of the major festivals, news of the ongoing building projects, stories of miracles, visitor statistics, as well as letters, financial gifts and other ex-votos that had been sent by the rapidly-growing community of devotees. In the early issues of the RNP, we also get some explicit and carefully thought-out appraisals of the relationship between ‘New’ and ‘Old’ Pompeii. The following passage dates from April 1887:
‘On top of mountains, we see the most famous sanctuaries arise: Carmel, Loreto, MonteVergine, Oropa, Lourdes. But no other sanctuary has ever been seen to rise in a Valley that has a mountain of fire for a head, and ashes and lapilli for a bed – and for her foundation, ruins of sepulchres and pagan habitations. Here, the Queen of Heaven has established her throne on the ruins of pagan idols, and on the ashes of the destroyed pagan grandeur.’ [RNP 1887: 89]
In this passage, the classical ruins first serve a localising or anchoring function, helping to fix or ‘root’ the sanctuary in a certain portion of the landscape. They also testify to the long history of the place, and its diverse material constitution: ashes, fire and lapilli (tiny volcanic stones - other materials that crop up regularly are roses, dust, incense and tears). In turn, the ruins communicate ideas about the New Christian Pompeii: here and elsewhere in Longo’s writing the ‘pagan idols’ of antiquity are contrasted with Christian truth, while ‘pagan grandeur’ contrasts with Christian simplicity and moral steadfastness. The reference to ancient Pompeii as ‘destroyed’, together with the description of Mary ‘establishing her throne on the ruins’, also ties into a much broader Catholic discourse about Marian victory and triumph. In other passages of his writing Bartolo Longo uses the ruins to explore the notion of rebirth, imagining the New Pompeii rising up like a phoenix from the ashes of antiquity. And at other times, the ruins are described in terms of dirt, death and misery, and thus became used as evidence of the Madonna’s generosity in choosing Pompeii as the unlikely site of her new throne (note that this word trono is routinely used to denote the landscape itself, as well as – more specifically – the marble structure within the church on which the painting is placed).
Surveying the geological landscape: Vesuvius and Monte Gauro
Bartolo Longo’s adoption of classical ruins into narratives of Christian victory and triumph echoed themes from earlier Christian art and literature, and also resonated with another local form of sacred geography, the presepe napoletano. In the presepi (Neapolitan nativity scenes) the scene of Christ’s birth was traditionally located underneath crumbling classical architecture, and – as I have explored in another article – this juxtaposition was widely recognised as a symbol of Christian triumph over pagan antiquity. In the Valley of Pompeii, these ruins became part of a wider ‘legendary topography’ [4] which revolved as much around the geological contours of the landscape as around the historical elements.
At one end of the Valley rose the volcano, Vesuvius. The multivalency of volcanoes has already been touched on by Ratu Saraswati in relation to landscape in Indonesia. ‘On one hand, a volcano’s eruption is a potential threat’, she writes, ‘but, on the other hand, its soil is very fertile and important for the people who live on agriculture’. In nineteenth-century Pompeii, too, this dual nature of the ‘mountain of fire’ provided a rich metaphor for exploring the dichotomies of life and death, good and evil. Vesuvius could be depicted as the source of nourishing food and natural beauty – but it could also be an agent of divine anger and destruction. The triangulation of life + death + volcano is present in many of the paintings and devotional images found at Pompeii. Figure 4, for example, shows Vesuvius gently smoking in the distant background above the ruins of the classical city it had destroyed – which contrast with the deep green foliage and the red roses surrounding the marble portico.
Figure 4. Devotional image based on the painting of the Blessed Virgin of the Rosary in the Pompeii sanctuary. Note the addition of Vesuvius and the archaeological excavations in the background – features which situate as well as shape Catholic veneration in Pompeii. Image Credit.
Other geological features in the Valley were equally sacred and symbolic. Opposite Vesuvius stood Monte Gauro (now known as Monte Faito), a tall mountain where, in the sixth century, St Michael had appeared to the Bishop of the nearby town of Castellammare. In his History of the Shrine of Pompeii, Longo recounts:
‘I have written these pages in my little study [...]. From this room I behold the summit of Mount Gauro, made memorable by the apparition of the Archangel Saint Michael to Saint Catello, Bishop of Castellammare […]. And at the sight of the lovely azure sky above me, and at the contemplation of that mount which constantly recalls to my mind the celestial apparition and the angelic colloquy, it has seemed to me, while writing, that I too, far from speaking to mortals of this earth, was conversing with beings who soar through the infinitude of space.’
‘Beings who soar through the infinitude of space’ – this phrase reminds us that landscapes are not to be seen only in terms of ‘surface’, but also in terms of horizontal ‘zoning’. The valley of Pompeii in the nineteenth century was a dynamically stratified environment, with elements from the ‘above’ and ‘below’ frequently swapping places. Roman archaeological finds and medieval burials pushed their way to the surface, making themselves known after centuries in the underground darkness. Volcanic lava and heat were never far from view either: a powerful eruption in April 1872 was followed by a long period of persistent Strombolian activity during which viscous flows of lava formed a new dome on Vesuvius, before a further eruption in 1906. Meanwhile, above human eye-level, the ever-mobile archangel Michael was ‘constantly recalled to mind’ as the patron and protector of the sanctuary. And right at the top of this scene – as frequently described in the RNP – was the Madonna on her throne, crowned with stars and holding a ‘vexillum [Roman military standard] of glory’.
Towards a global Pompeii
Figure 5. Screenshot from the sanctuary’s website: a portal leading to different translations of the Supplica (‘Petition’) prayer authored by Bartolo Longo in 1883.
The sanctuary at Pompeii was deeply rooted within its ancient landscape. This rootedness becomes even more striking when we consider Pompeii as a global phenomenon. Right from its earliest issues, the Rosary and the New Pompeii was distributed all over Italy, gradually drawing subscribers from further afield, including Malta, England, Brazil, the USA, Canada, India and China. Statistics about the international audience of Pompeii are frequently cited in the RNP, attesting to its global reach. For instance, the year of 1888 saw 1,493 letters received from various parts of the world including ‘America, Oceania, Africa, Asia, Malta, Bohemia, Illiria, Moravia, Hungary, Tyrol and San Marino’ [RNP 1889: 7].
What did the Valley of Pompeii mean to the thousands of people who apprehended it from a distance, through reading the RNP and other Pompeian publications? I would argue that, for these people, the sanctuary literature created and codified a legendary topography – a part-material, part-imaginary entity that I have been calling, in my project, ‘the enchanted valley’. Throughout the pages of the RNP and other written sources, we are constantly returned to a number of key places within the Pompeian valley that have some kind of historical or miraculous narrative attached to them – or else that have some significance within Longo’s biography or the foundation narrative of the sanctuary. These spiritual and symbolic ‘hotspots’ include Vesuvius and Monte Gauro, as well as the Roman excavations and salient spots within them (such as the amphitheatre and the Temple of Isis). Others are the Sarno river and its canal, and the zone of Arpaja (‘the place of the Harpies’, where Longo had his mission revealed to him: see Figure 9 below), the modern piazza and the Via Sacra, and the sanctuary building itself. Often these localities were described in detail by Longo and his collaborators, and they must have become familiar mental images for the journal’s regular readers.
At the same time, imagining and reading about a landscape is not the same as exploring it in person. In Ratu Saraswati’s essay, she describes the intimate, mindful ways in which she and her participants connected with the East Jakarta landscape, for instance, by collecting the morning dew, and by feeling the contours of the ground that lay beneath them. What possibilities of connection were available to people who lived far away from Pompeii – a space which was nevertheless profoundly important to them? One strategy for connecting with the sanctuary was via spoken devotions, and particularly the long prayers that were authored by Bartolo Longo. The Supplica, for example, was – and still is – proclaimed twice-yearly at midday Italian time on the 8th May and the first Sunday in October, thus joining the widely-scattered faithful in a synchronous act of worship. Other techniques of connection revolved around objects, images and substances which originated in the sanctuary, and which could be touched, contemplated and even consumed once they had reached their destination. In the book Sweet Mother (about the sanctuary’s collection of ex-votos), Monsignor Pietro Caggiano records instances of people experiencing healing miracles on receipt of a telegram from the sanctuary, or of a copy of the Rosario e la Nuova Pompei [Caggiano, Rak and Turchini 1990: 32-35]. One miracle occurred in India when oil from the Pompeian sanctuary’s lamps was smeared into a man’s wound; meanwhile, closer to home, a Neapolitan Baroness touched a sick boy’s arm with a bracelet depicting the Madonna of Pompeii – ‘the same bracelet that had touched Her Image’ – after which the boy was ‘perfectly cured’ [both stories from RNP 1899, cited in Caggiano, Rak and Turchini 1990: 35].
Figure 6. The typed envelope reads ‘Rose petals: gathered in the Rose garden of Our Lady in the Valley of Pompeii, placed as adornment on the Altar and Throne of the Queen of the Rosary in the month of May 1911, and blessed on the feast of Pentecost on that same Altar of the Most Holy Virgin. N.B. these are given out free of charge for the benefit of the sick.’ From Caggiano, Rak and Turchini (1990) p. 34.
Another of the examples cited by Monsignor Caggiano is particularly relevant to this Fall Issue of The Jugaad Project, and its theme of (sacred) landscapes. Figure 6 shows a small envelope alongside a handful of dried roses, which the typed words on the envelope explain were grown in the roseto di Maria (‘the rose garden of Mary’). This rose garden once stood in the sanctuary grounds, and provided the roses that decorated the church and which were distributed from the altar on the feast of Pentecost. Petals from these roses were also dried and posted around the world, often after having being held to touch the thaumaturgic painting. Once the petals reached their destination, they could be put in water to be revived, and then applied to the sick person’s body. Alternatively, the sick person could drink the water or eat the rose petals. Numerous miracles recorded in the RNP occurred after such uniquely embodied encounters with these delicate fragments of the Vesuvian landscape.
Travelling artefacts such as these rose petals, telegrams and holy prayer cards may have cultivated a longing for the physical landscape of Pompeii – or at least a curiosity about it. At the same time, though, these things also had the power to create autonomous new centres of devotion: miniaturised and condensed sites of holiness that became special and sacred within the devotee’s home or workplace [5]. Other new (and larger) centres were the new churches or parishes dedicated to Our Lady of Pompeii, where fresh material manifestations often reconfigured the cult – and its iconography – to fit a radically different setting. Figures 7 and 8 show a pair of examples which particularly struck Urmila Mohan and I, as we were browsing through photographs of various international churches and holy images dedicated to Our Lady of Pompeii. These two representations were created in the parish of Our Lady of Pompeii in Kaikamba, which is situated on the outskirts of Mangalore on the Western coast of India. Figure 7 shows a screenshot from the Kaikamba Parish Facebook page, where a tourist advert in English is juxtaposed with a thanksgiving message from a parishioner. The message, written in Konkani (the language spoken by the Catholic minority in Mangalore and Goa), gives ‘heartfelt thanks’ for ‘graces and blessing received from Our Lady of Pompei’. The image next to this message reproduces a familiar twentieth-century variation on the original Pompeian painting (see Figure 4 above) which may impart some ‘contact’ efficacy to the advert above. This version does not, however, include the archaeological ruins, and the image of Vesuvius is virtually lost in the image’s tight cropping.
Figure 7. (left) Screenshot from the Facebook page of the church of Our Lady of Pompei in Gurpura, Kaikamba, India. Figure 8. (right) A photograph of the statue on the outer wall and near the entrance to the church.
Meanwhile, the sculpture group at the entrance of the Kaikamba church (Figure 8) has a plain white background, with no sign of the Vesuvian landscape. Perhaps this is not surprising, since it may be that the model for the sculpture group was (a reproduction of) the painting in the sanctuary (see Fig. 1) rather than one of the colourful later versions which add extra background features (Figure 4). However, the artist has quite drastically altered the aesthetics of the original painting, in part by translating its flat surface into a dynamic three-dimensional model. As well as heightening the colours and adding floral garlands, the dynamics between the figures had been changed in ways that have a profound effect on the devotee’s interaction with the Madonna. In the original Pompeii painting, the bodies of St Dominic and St Catherine are oriented slightly towards the external viewer; in the statue, the saints have turned inwards, and appear to the viewer in profile. More importantly, while in the painting the Madonna and Child gaze down at St Dominic and St Catherine, in the Kaikamba statue the Madonna instead gazes outwards, potentially returning the gaze of the devotee or other church visitor. The rotation of Our Lady’s face towards the viewer brings Pompeii more in line with other nineteenth-century pilgrimage sites which have three-dimensional statues as their focus, such as Lourdes and Fátima, where the statue’s ‘enthralling gaze […] embodies the presence of the Virgin for the devout, appealing directly to the soul and thereby eclipsing the appeal of false gods such as political ideologies like Communism’ [Morgan 2009]. David Morgan’s words here show the importance of context in understanding the specific (in this case political) meanings of gaze in Marian iconography. Might we connect the changed form of the Kaikamba statue, then, to Mangalorean and perhaps far older Indic ideas about the frontal, hierarchic efficacy of darshan [Eck 1981] and the darshanic gaze?
Figure 9. A detail from a canvas by Maestro Franco Gracco displayed in one of the corridors of the Pompeii sanctuary. This panel is 1 x 1.20m. This image represents the episode in Longo’s biography where he describes receiving his mission: “All Nature lay wrapt in the deepest silence. I looked around me; not even the shadow of a living soul. Suddenly I came to a dead stop; my heart was bursting within me. In such darkness of being it seemed to me as though a friendly voice were whispering to me those same words that I had read, and that a true and holy friend of mine, now gone to his rest, was wont to repeat to me: “If you seek to be saved promulgate the Rosary. This is dear Mary's own promise.” (History of the Shrine of Pompeii p. 87). Photo by author.
Further questions also arise from the comparison: for instance, how does this new 3D version of the scene lead us to re-think the centrality (or otherwise) of visuality back in Pompeii, where – somewhat unusually for a Marian sanctuary of this period – the foundation narrative does not include any visual apparitions of Mary, but instead emphasises the sense of hearing, and the potency of the spoken word (Figure 9)?
These two examples from the Kaikamba church in South India indicate that there are myriad different ways in which global versions of the Madonna of Pompeii can be localised as well as related back to the ‘original’ Italian painting – and to the landscape in which that painting resides. Like the rose petals shown at Figure 5 above, some of the new international images do include tenuous links with the landscape of Pompeii, and continue to reference its legendary topography (as with the Vesuvius in the background of Figure 7). Others, in the same location, suppress that topography – creating new and independent representations which seem (like the three-dimensional statue from the Kaikamba church) to inhabit something of a geographical vacuum. Furthermore, I would argue that new international images like the ones from Kaikamba have, gradually and collectively, re-shaped the content of Pompeii’s legendary topography, both by marking and consolidating its limits, and by impacting on how writers and artists back in Italy have chosen to represent the sanctuary’s relationship with the local Vesuvian landscape. To give an example from my project on the classical ruins: when I review the data from the RNP, it becomes clear that the early issues from the 1880s contain frequent references to the archaeological site; however, over subsequent years, references to the archaeological site became much less frequent, and instead give way to reports and letters from the sanctuary’s new international parishes. The impact of the global upon the local can also be seen when we track the various modifications made to the text of the Supplica, a prayer that was initially written for a local Italian audience, but which then became a hallmark of the sanctuary’s internationalism and diversity (see Figure 5 above). The original version of the Supplica invoked the Madonna in the following way: ‘O glorious Queen of the most holy Rosary, we, thy happy children chosen by thy goodness in this century to build thee a temple at Pompeii, kneeling at thy feet on this solemn day to commemorate thy latest triumphs on the spot where idols and demons were formerly worshipped”. Instead, later versions of the prayer omit the last phrase about ‘the spot where idols and demons were formerly worshipped’ – an edit which, we might surmise, was made in response to the growing international reach of this prayer – so central to Pompeian devotion. Indeed, in his essay in the volume Sweet Mother, Monsignor Caggiano writes in relation to the Supplica and other prayers written by Bartolo Longo: ‘[When we say] “in Pompeii” […] we do not merely mean geographically, but as a “method” of prayer’ [Caggiano, Rak and Turchini 1997: 30)]. In the search for innovative means of spreading spiritual connections, even the most sacred landscape can be transcended.
Conclusion
This exploration of the sanctuary of Pompeii has focused primarily on the territory of the Valley of Pompeii in Southern Italy. We have seen how, right from the beginning of its history, the sanctuary at Pompeii was rooted in its local terrain – an ancient and stratified place which gave Bartolo Longo and his collaborators access to a rich catalogue of metaphors. We have also looked briefly beyond the Valley of Pompeii, to think about how devotion to the Madonna of Pompeii changed as it travelled across borders and took on material form in new national and religious contexts. We have seen how distant devotees of the Madonna of Pompeii forged connections with the Vesuvian site in a variety of ways, for instance via material objects that originated in Pompeii (roses, magazines, holy images) or by the manufacture of new images, such as the statue and digital thanksgiving made in Kaikamba in India. Meanwhile, the constant traffic of pilgrims, devotional objects between the New Pompeii and its satellite parishes gradually led to the valley becoming a kind of umbilicus mundi – a charged, demarcated segment of the landscape which had material and symbolic links with many other places around the globe, as well as so many historical, geological, religious and legendary layers. Ultimately, I hope to have shown that this very special sanctuary gives us an unparalleled opportunity to explore the interplays – not only between local and global forms of Catholicism – but also between classical antiquity and the present, and all the spaces in between.
This essay derives from research that will be published in a book that is currently in preparation, provisionally entitled “Religion and Memory in the Valley of Pompeii”. With thanks to Urmila Mohan, David Morgan, and Mons. Pietro Caggiano.
Endnotes
[1] The painting is thought to date from the seventeenth century, and has been attributed to an artist from the Neapolitan school of Luca Giordano (1634-1705). It was given to Bartolo Longo in 1875 by a nun (Sister Maria Concetta De Litala) from the Convent of the Rosariello at Porta Medina in Naples. The painting originally showed St Dominic and St Rose of Lima, but Bartolo Longo instructed the painter Federico Maldarelli to change the figure of St Rose into St Catherine of Siena. The painting has been restored three times, most recently in 1965, at the Pontifical Institute of the Padre Benedettini Olivetani.
[2] Coleman (2009). Walsingham is a landscape which contains the ‘spectral presences of people who had lived in or visited the village throughout its many centuries of existence’. At Walsingham, as at Pompeii, ‘there is a sense of the past having a certain agency and urgency in the present’, and ‘there is also the sense of the ghost as an image – a visual, embodied representation of the past – that can touch the living’ (Coleman 2009: 18).
[3] Vogel and Märker (2010). Alwyn Scarth’s 2009 book Vesuvius: A Biography (Princeton UP) gives helpful synopses of the literature from the Earth sciences, together with eye-witness accounts of the various eruptions from 79CE onwards. As Scarth warns in his Preface, ‘Vesuvius is well worth the closest scrutiny, because it may be approaching its most violent outburst since 1631.’
[4] The phrase ‘legendary topography’ is borrowed from Halbwachs (1942). My use of this phrase is not entirely analogous to Halbwach’s, since there are significant differences between the processes of memorialisation in the Holy Land and in the Valley of Pompeii. However, certain themes from Halbwach’s 1942 book are relevant to my study, such as the idea that historic landscapes are understood and re-mapped according to the needs of successive ‘presents’, as well as his notion of ‘grafting’ new memories onto older ones. The concept of legendary topography also helps in thinking about the gap between on-site experiences of a landscape versus off-site imaginings and representations: for instance, H. notes how certain localities become ‘stabilised’ through the ‘symbolic reflections’ of departed group members, at the same time as the places themselves continue to materially evolve, whether through processes of decay, or (as in the case of nineteenth-century Pompeii) through excavation and over-building.
[5] Concepts of miniaturisation and fragmentation were explored in a previous article for The Jugaad Project, on Yves Klein’s Ex-voto to St Rita of Cascia.
References
Caggiano, Pietro, Rak, Michele and Turchini, Angelo (1990) Sweet Mother, Pompei Delegazione Pontificia, Cava dei Tirreni: Arte Grafiche Di Mauro [Italian title: La Madre Bella].
Coleman, Simon (2009) ‘Mary on the Margins? The Modulation of Maria Imagery in Place, Memory and Performance’, in Anna-Karina Hermkens, Willy Jansen and Catrien Notermans (eds) Moved by Mary: The Power of Pilgrimage in the Modern World, Farnham: Ashgate, pp. 17-32.
Eck, Diana. 1981. Darsan: Seeing the Divine Image in India, Chambersburg, PA: Anima Books.
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