Pompeo Sarnelli

Pompeo Sarnelli (born 28 January 1649, died 7 July 1724) was a Roman Catholic prelate who served as Bishop of Bisceglie (1692–1724).

Biography
Pompeo Sarnelli was born in Polignano a Mare, Italy in 1649. He moved to Naples when he was an adolescent. There, he studied theology and law and, after he became a priest in 1669, worked for Cardinal Vincenzo Maria Orsini. In 1689, he refused a position at the bishopric of Termoli. On 24 March 1692, he was appointed during the papacy of Pope Innocent XII as Bishop of Bisceglie. On 4 May 1692, he was consecrated bishop by Pietro Francesco Orsini, Archbishop of Benevento. He served as Bishop of Bisceglie until his death in 1724.

Works
Throughout all his years of activity, Sarnelli wrote several erudite works, in prose and verse, including many elegies and odes in Latin, a commentary on Latin poems (Il filo d’Arianna) and Memories of the Bishops of Bisceglie and of the same Town (Naples 1693), in which church history and local history are fully mixed in a Counter-Reformation way. His Bestiarum schola, a collection of moralizing fables in prose, was published in 1680. Sarnelli edited Bulifon's edition of Giambattista Basile's The Tale of Tales (1674), the first to bear the alternative title Il Pentamerone, by which Basile's work would subsequently be best known. Its publication marked the beginning of a long and fruitful collaboration between the Frenchman Bulifon and the Italian Sarnelli, as the priest would serve as Bulifon's most active editor and author over the course of the next thirty years. For Bulifon's press, Sarnelli wrote theological and devotional treatises, school readers, and a collection of five fairy tales written in Neapolitan language which bore the title of Posilecheata (1684). In 1710, Sarnelli authored the first commentary on the surviving portions of the Book of the Watchers, the first section of the Book of Enoch. He also edited Italian translations of della Porta's Chirofisonomia and Magia Naturalis (1677).