Below the Clouds: documentary tribute to Naples is filled with sepulchral melancholy

• Reviewed from the 69th BFI London Film Festival 2025

For much of Below the Clouds it might have been called Below the Crowds since it so often concerns what it calls the ‘disembowelling’ of the city, the tunnelling by thieves into buried archeological sites to steal antique Roman and Etruscan treasures. We’ve seen these brigands portrayed semi-romantically in such compelling dramas as Fellini’s Il Bidone (1955) and Alice Rohrwacher’s La Chimera (2023), but the real life vandals are absent from this poetic, visually arresting documentary which shows the perfidious consequences of their greed, responsible, for example, for stripping one underground villa of its entire 12 walls of unique frescoes. 

Not that the film takes us so often below ground as that emphasis suggests. A concern for antiquity is just one of many strands Gianfranco Rosi explored in three years of investigation and shooting in the region. First, there’s the clouds themselves, not only in the sky but also billowing out of the earth. A Jean Cocteau quotation, ’Vesuvius makes all the clouds in the world’, acts as the film’s epigraph. 

Emissions of smoke expand in caulifloweric glory from the pores of Vesuvius and the caldera of the Phlegraean Fields before thinning to drifting wisps. They evoke, metaphorically, the deliberate vagueness with which the film presents itself. You’re expected to work stuff out for yourself. What seems at first like an antique store or a bookshop turns out to be an after-school club run by a retired teacher. Scenes of a grain ship docking and painstakingly unloading its cargo turn out to have a political dimension when we learn that the crew are Syrians exiles who have to go in and out of Odessa to get their load while it’s being bombed by the Russians. 

Rosi’s patiently observant, multi-viewpoint approach to his subject here is similar to that which made his Rome-set Sacro GRA (2013), which won the Venice Golden Lion, and his Lampedusa-set Fire at Sea (2016), winner of the Berlin Golden Bear, such satisfying successes. Together, they form a natural triptych of sociological revelation. If anything, Below the Clouds feels even more instinctively fluid than its forebears. Although Rosi has a multicultural background – he was born in Eritrea and grew up in Italy and Turkey – Below the Clouds feels more ‘at home’ with its locale than did Notturno (2020), his more recent survey of lives and habitats being rebuilt in war zones across the middle east. 

Like the tomb raiders, Rosi likes to burrow into things for their essence. His use of the Circumvesuviana, the network of train lines that links the suburbs and heritage sites like Pompeii and Herculaneum to the main and is sometimes bewildering to tourists, offers a rapid portraiture of backlots and fleeting windows in endless twisting tracking shots. 

But what best brings the citizens of Naples to light is the voices we hear calling the switchboard of the Fire Brigade, whose operators are commendably benign and indulgent when people express their fears about the latest tremors, or with issues more relevant to the police or even the one elderly man who calls regularly to find out the time. These scenes are laced with a mordant humour that also enlivens those of the white-coated curators of the famous Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli. Their torchlit examination of piles of heads, sandalled feet and other sculptural fragments, littered like junk across the floor of their store, comes with a kind of weary, rueful love and acceptance that this is how it is. 

Rosi uses an old abandoned movie theatre, which we see both in ruins and spruced up a little, to project (for contrast) other films about Naples, not least the scene in Rossellini’s Journey to Italy (1954) where Ingrid Bergman and George Sanders are being shown how the bodies of people caught in the AD79 eruption of Vesuvius created natural casts under the hardened ashes, from which their death-struck figures re-emerge as newly poured plaster likenesses. 

There are also scenes of a Japanese team of archeologists at work on the gentlest kind of dig, but it’s best not to imagine too much of this film as being in daylight. It has a sepulchral melancholy to it, gifted by Rosi’s own beautiful, high contrast, black-and-white cinematography, and his fondness for the city lit up at night. It is even a touch funereal. That one might be living on the brink of some terrible catastrophe seems not far from sleepless Neapolitan minds, and, these days, given the seeming chaos of world politics, maybe it should be closer to ours too.