This paper investigates the way particular locations in the Romantic period can operate as nodal points for the convergence of questions about materiality, representation, and presence. A location can be, in certain instances, a place of dislocation, or of emptiness, and scenes and sites of ruin, particularly, may evoke ideas of vacancy and oblivion even through their material presentness. Visitors to the entombed city of Pompeii, which was effectively frozen in time by the volcanic eruption of Vesuvius in AD79, have always been struck by the sense of walking back into the past, while at the same time experiencing, in the present, the overwhelming presence of death. Time has been, on the one hand, suspended – and history held in abeyance – while on the other, the very transience or vacancy of time is captured. What famously attracted Freud to Wilhelm Jensen's 1903 novella Gradiva, set in the city of Pompeii, was this very idea of the past locked into and embedded in the present, which provided suggestive spatial and archaeological analogies for the aims and procedures of psychoanalysis. For the Romantic traveller, encountering the site in the early decades after its ‘rediscovery’ in the middle of the eighteenth century, the most striking feature of this ‘city of the dead’ was precisely the perception of the past co-mingling with the present.