The soil, air, and sea beneath Mount Vesuvius is steeped in memories that recount the catastrophic 79 AD eruption which interred the prosperous Roman city of Pompeii and its populace. Contemporary life in this region absorbs both this impression and the enduring threat of history’s repetition, yet, isn’t overcome by a nostalgia that confines it. Like everywhere, people go on living, as Gianfranco Rosi’s 2025 film Pompei: Below the Clouds goes to show. In this work, Rosi documents the essence of the present by observing the day to day encounters of those who live in Naples and its Gulf. What emerges is a narrative of the region’s residents in a state of continuous tinkering with their communal memory, one that repeatedly asks and answers: what’s it like living atop the ruins of ancient history and beneath the seismic, hovering embrace of an active volcano?

Since the subterranean city of Pompeii’s rediscovery and the mobilization of modernity, the portrait of the nearby Naples that has crystallized is characterized by stark distinctions between light and dark—it is the city of Caravaggio’s exile, of chiaroscuro, after all. In Rosi’s film, the city’s heart beats with recollections of ruin, but expands far beyond trope to capture something atomic about the undulating interdependence between two poles. Striking black and white photography renders a Naples always in dialogue with its dichotomies: land meets sea, life meets death. When the past and present meet, Neapolitans adapt. 

The film rhythmically sways from staggering landscapes of the volcano and the Phlegraean Fields to intimate, domestic scenes like one that takes place in the cosy interior of an antique shop. Its storekeeper, Titti, runs a quaint afterschool study hall, where he warmly passes his knowledge on subjects like the difference between grain and corn, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s early vision for Italian futurism, and the origins of the Neapolitan dialect down to the local youth. Using the example of a tin can (scatola in Italian), Titti remarks on how his native vocabulary is composed of borrowed words—Neapolitans use buatta, from the French boîte. Language, here, is a richly textured fabric made up of time folding onto itself. Yesteryear’s codes of meaning have always continued to be remade anew.

What emerges in his narration of the region’s tongue is a metaphor that extends across various vignettes. This depiction of the language is the same as another picture the film regularly returns to—that of a bouillabaisse of busts, half-embodied statues, and other remnants of Roman or Bourbon antiquity collecting dust in the dark basement of the city’s archaeological museum. All the emblems of history that mélange underground represent pockets of bygone trauma and triumph, which, because of their jumbling, we can’t always know. As an archivist puts it, “Time destroys everything, preserves everything, and then returns to us in an unexpected, unforeseen way, this accumulation of history preserved here.” 

In the first of two recurring scenes that animate diverging experiences of Neapolitan life, we hear locals call into the fire department with concerns that range from the severe and life-threatening, to inquiries on what time it is. Following an earthquake’s tremor, several ask what to do. Dispatchers provide responses that are compassionate and community-minded, yet mired in the limitations of the systems they rely upon; municipal resources are tapped out in Naples, it seems. An elder asks, “Which death do they want us to die?” She goes unanswered. 

The other takes place on the shores of the Tyrrhenian Sea and follows today’s seafarers, who are young Syrian men. Playing cog in the machinery of industry’s churn are Aboud and his colleague, both of whom view Naples as a picturesque, safe harbour that’s only one stop on their naval journey. Odessa-under-siege looms far more imminently in their minds than any potential disaster that’s tectonic in nature. Aboud tends to bright white grain as it rhythmically pours into cylinders and becomes indecipherable from ash—these men, one could imagine, are considered by locals as outside of their own city-sphere, even though they are individuals who follow generations upon generations of foreigners who have moved crops across sea and land on these coasts. 

Yet another of the loops Rosi’s camera returns to is an image inside an old cinema. All the chairs in the house are empty. Roberto Rossellini’s Journey to Italy plays, and as the house itself begins to crumble before our eyes, a quote by Jean Cocteau comes to mind, “Cinema is death at work.” Chemicals and light converge to remake the world as hopeful image, yet film is only ever capable of giving the impression of suspension, of halting life’s forward momentum towards death. Like the hypothetical futures and frescos stolen by tomb raiders under the earth, and the cultural memories handed down and modified in the backrooms of private Neapolitan spaces, a record of any place or any life is always set to be incomplete.

Life in Rosi’s Naples is not about sentimentality nor nostalgia. In treating the idea that there’s loss in what could have been with reverence, but not romanticism, Rosi opens up new potential for actual collective memory to give us something far more valuable: a portrait of Naples that is as alive and ever-evolving as its citizens.