Overview
Naples faces dual volcanic threats from Vesuvius and Campi Flegrei. Amid increasing tremors, archaeologists work as residents live anxiously, haunted by Pompeii's fate while emergency services strain.
Reviews
I shouldn’t have felt misled by the title of this rather dry and repetitive documentary, but I did. Instead of getting something archaeological and historical, I found myself watching something altogether more sociological and anthropic, and I must confess I wasn’t so very interested in that. With Mount Vesuvius making it’s presence felt nearby and with the tectonics beneath them suggesting a degree of planetary indigestion, the good folks of Naples are taking to their phones to ask their remarkably stoic and patience fire and police services whether or not events from the year 79 are about to repeat themselves. Some of these callers are borderline panic-stricken, some more rational but either way they are given polite and confident assurances that all is not going to come tumbling down any time soon. Intermittently, we do stray occasionally into the realms of the mosaic and explore a few of the world famous excavations or visit them in galleries, but as the entire film is presented in monochrome - and frequently during the night - it quickly ceases to be eerily effective and starts to become dingy and affecting. There may well be some beautiful photography here of some ancient and beautiful sights, but the complete lack of structure to this observation left me as rudderless as one of the triremes that got sunk by molten lava. The narrative is fairly all-encompassing and deals with just about every aspect of Neapolitan life, love, pollution, immigration, art and religion and it also clearly intends to draw parallels between the ancient and the contemporary but I don’t know, I just left me feeling a bit short-changed.
