In 1872 the valley below Vesuvius was a malarial plain with a few farmers and no town: the ruins of ancient Pompeii were there, and around them nothing. To it came a lawyer from Apulia, Bartolo Longo, who as a young man had lost himself in spiritualism and then changed his life, and he began teaching the rosary to the labourers. He got hold of a painting of the Madonna bought for a few coins from a junk dealer in Naples, in poor condition, and brought it here on a cart. Around that picture a shrine, a city and a system of orphanages grew up.
What to see
The church was built with offerings, often tiny ones, from tens of thousands of people, and enlarged in the twentieth century to its present size: it is enormous, pale, with a dome and decoration in nineteenth-century taste, and on the high altar hangs the painting, restored several times, which is the reason for all of it. Devotion here is alive and visible: people pray aloud, arrive by coach, come back every year.
Beside the shrine are the buildings Longo put up for the children of prisoners and for orphans, which were the part of the project he cared about most. The bell tower, eighty metres high, has a lift and can be climbed. Bartolo Longo was beatified in 1980 and proclaimed a saint in 2025.
Visiting
The shrine is in the centre of modern Pompei, five minutes on foot from the Porta Marina Superiore entrance to the excavations and from the Circumvesuviana station; free entry, open daily with long hours. Half an hour, plus the climb up the tower, which has its own ticket and hours. On the great Marian feast days, in May and October, the square fills up.
Our editors' tip
Climb the bell tower: from up there you see, from one spot, the ruins of the Roman city on one side, Vesuvius on the other and the roofs of the new town all around. They are three different Pompeis at a glance, and they were born two thousand years apart.