Anecdotes about the Virgin Mary

"Bartolo Longo and Our Lady of the Rosary of Pompeii"

Pompeii (Italy) (1872-1901)

Bartolo Longo had been a lawyer with anticlerical views, even frequenting spiritualist circles. His conversion, guided by a good confessor and by Countess Marianna Farnararo, changed his entire life. Around 1872-1875 he arrived in the area of the new Pompeii, a poor and spiritually abandoned town, built in the shadow of the ruins that Vesuvius had buried in 79 AD.

There, Bartolo made the rosary the center of his life and his apostolate. He wanted to give that people, ignorant of the faith, a Marian image, and he received from a nun, Sister Maria Concetta De Litala, an old and badly deteriorated canvas of Our Lady of the Rosary giving the rosary to Saint Dominic and Saint Catherine of Siena. The painting, which had passed through several hands and was almost destined for oblivion, was restored in Naples and enshrined in the nascent sanctuary.

The foundation stone of the church was laid on May 8, 1876. The sanctuary was consecrated on May 8, 1891, and elevated to a Pontifical Basilica by Leo XIII on May 4, 1901. Around it, Bartolo founded schools and works for orphans and for the children of prisoners, all under the protection of the Virgin Mary. He also composed the famous "Supplication to the Queen of the Holy Rosary of Pompeii," which is still solemnly recited today on May 8 and the first Sunday of October.