The film opens  with Jean Cocteau’s line: “Vesuvius produces all the clouds in the world.” From there, Rosi interlaces recurring situations. Archival footage of Vesuvius leads to Pompeii, where the precariousness of existence resonates with the work of technicians and photographers cataloguing relics, while a Japanese team from the University of Tokyo continues its decades-long excavation of Villa Augusta. If history accumulates in layers, the present appears unstable. Rosi observes the fire brigade’s switchboard besieged by incessant calls during repeated tremors, as the Campi Flegrei loom menacingly. To this collective anxiety he contrasts nearly static compelling night views of Naples. Precariousness also weighs on Syrian sailors shuttling between bombarded Ukraine and the port of Naples, unloading 32,000 tons of grain from the cavernous belly of their ship. Precarious too is the future of a group of boys welcomed by Mr. Titti in the backroom of his shop, where he organizes a kind of after-school tutoring for disadvantaged children. Lifting his eyes from the book by Hugo, he tells one of them: “You are the wretched (les misérables) of our time.”Rosi here adopts a visual grammar that situates the film within the tradition of the film essay and visual anthropology. The magnificent black and white, which abstracts locations from any picturesque dimension, operates as a device of estrangement, turning Naples into an archaeological landscape, suspended between ruin and survival. The use of static long takes is not merely aesthetic but analytical: each image becomes an observational field where reality accumulates.The juxtaposition of heterogeneous scenes, without commentary, recalls a genealogy that stretches from Soviet dialectical montage to Pasolini’s “cinema of poetry,” and even Antonioni’s silences. The result is an open dispositif that does not order but problematizes, entrusting the viewer with hermeneutic responsibility. In this way, Rosi radicalizes his conception of cinema as a political act of vision: not to illustrate reality, but to interrogate the very conditions of its representation.Teresa Cavina