‘Below the Clouds’ Review: Gianfranco Rosi’s Volcano Doc Erupts with Humanity [B+] Venice

Since the start of humanity, mankind has always been fascinated with the concept of time. The notion of past, present, future has often been analyzed in literature, music, film, theater: even though it’s an artificial and arbitrary concept, how does it work? There are places that are constantly evolving: visit New York one year, it will already feel different the next; Paris, very jealous of its history, will change just the right amount to keep up with the modern times. There are other places, though, that seem still, unchanged, whose pace and rhythm are very specific and won’t be affected by the passage of time. Sotto Le Nuvole (Below the Clouds), directed by Golden Bear and Golden Lion winner Gianfranco Rosi, travels to Naples to explore the city from this particular point of view.

The film opens with a quote from Jean Cocteau that reads “The Vesuvius makes all the clouds in the world.” Mount Vesuvius is the mountain and volcano that dominates the city of Naples and its gulf: immutable and imposing, Vesuvius is both a source of pride and fear for the inhabitants of the area. It is the volcano that destroyed Pompeii and Ercolano in AD 79, the volcano everyone in Naples and surrounding areas is terrified of. What happens if the volcano, which is currently quiescent, wakes up and erupts again? The area adjacent to is has a population of around 700,000 people at immediate risk if the mountain erupts again. Perhaps it’s also the proximity to Pompeii that feeds into that fear. One of the most popular tourist destinations in the area, Pompeii and its destruction are still studied with admirable perseverance: the film follows a group of Japanese archaeologists who, unfazed by the weather, examine the remains of the city. In the attempt to hang onto the past, a museum worker and archaeologist tries to make sense of the statues in her deposit: what are they? What were they supposed to be when they were made? The study of the past becomes the study of the present and future, in Rosi’s film.

Of course, being a volcanic area, especially at a time when the volcanoes in the Phlegraean Fields are starting to shake the ground again, the local citizens’ main concern is safety and survival. That’s why they call the firemen’s hotline: they want reassurance and words of comfort. Firemen also respond to other types of calls: from the man who wants to know what time it is three times a day to the woman who asks for police intervention against an abusive husband, this section of the film paints a wide and diverse portrait of the peculiar and deeply moving humanity of the city.

The relationship with the city’s past is pretty much front and center in the film: we can see a local guide leading a group of tourists into Napoli Sotterranea, the extraordinary underground ancient city, with its secret alleys and theaters; the look at Pompeii and Ercolano and its plastered bodies. What were they doing right then? It’s not just the Japanese archaeologists or the tourists who ask themselves that, it’s the local citizens who do that too, as they live with the fear that it might happen again. Curiously, Rosi intersects the real footage from to scenes from films like Rossellini’s Journey To Italy, screened in an abandoned theater. The power of cinema that never dies.

The city’s past creeps up like a ghost, or is taken advantage of, like in the case of the prosecutor and his officer who chase the tomb raiders through the tunnels under the city, as if to say that if a city or a people loses its connection to its past, it also loses that with its future. An old school teacher helps his young students with their homework, he scolds them, he jokes with them. Every generation needs an educator, even more so in Naples, a city with many pasts: like the teacher says, that city, which is now Italian, was inhabited by the Arabs, by the French, by the Spanish – that’s why the local dialect has so many calques and borrowings from other languages.

In the black and white chosen by Rosi, even the story of the Syrian ship workers who bring grain from Odessa, Ukraine feels almost out of time: two countries plagued by war connected by the same route that was used during the Roman Empire.

Despite a sometimes overly slow pace and lines of dialogue that seem a bit too staged to be fully believable, Below the Clouds is a lyrical love letter to a magical place, a time machine of a city that lives out of space and time, only protected by a few clouds in the sky.

Grade: B+

This review is from the 2025 Venice Film Festival.