“A Portent, beyond Statues Sweating Blood in the Forum …” reconstructs the fire that destroyed San Paolo fuori le mura in July 1823 and the despairing responses the event provoked in Rome.

“Luigi Poletti and the Challenge of Rebuilding San Paolo” details how Poletti set about pursuing a completely revised project for San Paolo that was historicist in all but name and which aimed at salvaging what he perceived as the flawed Early Christian basilica building type by recasting it in a neo-Renaissance idiom.

“The End of a Generation” describes the moment in the early 1830s when several of the central protagonists in the story to this point died or retired from the scene, opening the way for Belli’s successor, the young Modenese engineer Luigi Poletti, to take over directorship of the project.

“Broadening the Debate” explores the two-part campaign that was mounted to win over Pope Leo XII in favor of an exact reconstruction of the burned basilica.

“Pius IX and Romantic Aesthetics” presents the understudied history of artistic Catholic Romanticism in Rome between 1830 and 1860, yielding a new picture of Pope Pius IX’s Romantic inclinations in his early art patronage, not just at San Paolo but across Rome.

This chapter explores how religious knowledge, including rituals, was learned and transmitted by putting forward a novel, cognitive-based, theoretical framework for analysing ritual practices in the Graeco-Roman world. This framework, termed the Religious Learning Network (RLN) theoretical model, is tested within a case study of archaeological and epigraphic evidence of Nutrices Augustae, a cult of local Pannonian healing mother-goddesses. Applying the Religious Learning Network model provides an insight into the types of rituals that may have taken place within this cult as well as the cognitive and social effects that these rituals may have produced upon the ritual participants. This chapter demonstrates that rituals were learned and transmitted within intimate circles through cult members’ interaction with objects, places, and events; forming a dynamic network of memory associations that helped in the encoding, storage, and retrieval of religious and ritual memories.

“Resisting Resurrection” examines the causes and consequences of the bureaucratic paralysis that immobilized the San Paolo worksite following Leo XII’s seemingly straightforward order for an exact reconstruction.

“Material Histories” explores three different aspects of how materials and materiality functioned in giving meaning to the reconstructed San Paolo: Poletti’s reuse of ancient marbles salvaged from the old basilica to decorate his new choir; the unusual materials employed to confer meaning on his new St. Benedict chapel and baldachin; and the fetishized and then informationalized materiality of the consecration ceremony of 1840.

“Money Matters” offers an in-depth archival study of the first eight-year-long global fundraising campaign by which money was raised for the reconstruction of San Paolo between 1825 and 1833.

The Conclusion contrasts the principles that had underpinned the San Paolo reconstruction with those that guided Pius and his advisors after 1850, as they mobilized sacred history through new architectural and planning initiatives in Rome, rethinking the relationship between the international faithful and the institutional church and laying the groundwork for the modern papacy.

“Reframing the Debate” pieces together other elements of the campaign in favor of an exact reconstruction, leading up to a major success in spring 1825: Pope Leo XII’s decision to issue an international call for donations to the reconstruction.