The Mountain

To place oneself on the other side. Almost in a a game of reversals, the picture postcard outline of Vesuvius, tourist image par excellence, becomes “the mountain”: not the imposing, frightening volcano anymore, but a populated, lively territory whose inhabitants have established a privileged relationship with nature.. Having accepted living under constant risk with a fatalistic attitude, the residents exorcise fear through conscious and unconscious rites: hail nets thus potentially become a bride’s veil, celebrating imaginary nuptials with the land, a wooden phallus emerges from the shadow of an surreal funeral, satyrs and fairies dance and take care of the land. The documentary tones are tempered by an almost fairy-tale-like atmosphere, where time and space are ambiguous and nature reigns in its sublime beauty. Men, women, children, animals appear as mythical creatures populating magical woods, in a tale that moves from cruder images, more closely related to reality to fantastic visions that evoke undefined communities brought together by their relationship with the (super)natural consummated on the slopes of a stern and unpredictable God, but after all generous and conniving.