Vague Visages’ Below the Clouds review contains minor spoilers. Gianfranco Rosi’s 2025 documentary takes place in Naples, Italy. Check out the VV home page for more film criticism, movie reviews and film essays.

Gianfranco Rosi’s documentaries, at least those released after the intensely intimate and singular El Sicario, Room 164 (2010), initially feel disparate in the various parts of explored societies and communities. They are similar to an experimental collage, where the more one stares, the more it continues on, the more the connections become clearer. The joiner between these parts is always a singular structure, either natural or man-made that becomes like the monolith in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), traversing space, time and human experience, and becoming intrinsically a part of the people who live around it or interact with it. In Sacro GRA (2013), it’s the famous Grande Raccordo Anulare road encircling Rome; in Fire at Sea (2016), it’s the migration checkpoint of Lampedusa; in Notturno (2020), it’s the military checkpoints across Syria and Iraq. The surrounding people and histories of these areas become a sort of portal for Rosi to connect our world with the old world. This makes his documentaries vast in scope, almost epic in their makeup, even when they are all well under two hours long. Rosi’s latest documentary, Below the Clouds, focuses on the towering behemoth that is Mount Vesuvius and the people of Naples, Italy who live in its shadow.

Mount Vesuvius is an active volcano that looms like a specter over Naples. Its history is marked with infamous and devastating eruptions — the complete destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum are credited to it – and that history still strikes fear into the locals from time to time, even nearly 2,000 years later. In Below the Clouds, stunning black-and-white shots of the volcano juxtapose with intimate moments of communication between individuals living in the city. The fire department accepts calls from a range of individuals — some experience tragedy, from a lady who calls asking for protection from her belligerent drunk and abusive husband to more amusing moments of an old man calling every day just to ask what time it is. When a 3.5 scale earthquake hits Naples, Rosi incorporates a montage of various emergency calls to the local fire department where many community members shout, cry, whimper and ask “Is it Vesuvius?” In a local school, a septuagenarian teacher tries to get kids to read books, and they make light fun of each other’s generations. A Japanese archeology class comes to the Pompeii ruins to find and document artifacts that can tell more about the history and culture of the region. Syrian shipping laborers bring Ukranian grain and anticipate having to go back to a war zone instead of staying in the safety of Naples — an irony of the Italian city’s past that is not lost on Rosi. 

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Rosi’s beautiful cinematography in Below the Clouds is most notable in its varying of contrasts and textures between the exteriors and interiors of the city. The caves and homes of Naples feel distinctly sleek and high-contrast compared to Vesuvius and its immediate surroundings which have a low contrast, hazy, dusty look, with its ash and pebbles churning in the wind. The mounds of Ukranian grain being dumped from ships into small mountains have the same complexion, highlighting a metaphorical connection of past and present within both the volcano and Naples’ distinct cuisine. There is an all-encompassing appreciation for the culture of the city, even as the documentary concentrates on the ways the volcano has shaped it through time. Tragedy of the past finds itself in new forms in Below the Clouds. Specifically, with the Syrian laborers on the ships, Rosi shows the ways in which trade and war are intertwined. One of the laborers has a phone call with family members where he laments a return to Odessa as war continues between Russia and Ukraine, and opines how no matter where he goes, to his home country or around the world, he finds himself in danger and in war.

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In Below the Clouds, the past and present are tied together by Vesuvius, where not only fear and destruction have echoed through time, but also knowledge, culture, trade and art. Inside of a tomb, archeologists constantly dust off various statues, figurines, designs and records that were kept during the old Roman Empire. There is so much buried history that there’s also a tradition of tomb raiders in Italy who are so dedicated to stealing these precious artifacts and reselling them that they’ve created a tunnel highway with a full electrical grid under Naples that even impresses the city’s miners and civil engineers. Determining how homes and designs looked like back in pre-79 AD, before Pompeii was destroyed, requires a bit of imagination, but it’s a miracle that even the outlines of these houses and statues and paintings and moldings are decipherable in 2025. With Below the Clouds, Rosi makes it clear that history and the present interact every day.

Soham Gadre (@SohamGadre) is a writer/filmmaker based in Washington, D.C. He has contributed to publications such as Bustle, Frameland and Film Inquiry. Soham is currently in production for his first short film. All of his film and writing work can be found at extrasensoryfilms.com.

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