Napoli Explosion by Mario Amura
Napoli Explosion is an artistic and anthropological project that explores and transfigures a collective ritual unlike any other in the world: on New Year's Eve, the people of Naples set off thousands of fireworks around Vesuvius, in a monumental celebration of light and colour that defies the ancestral energy of the volcano.
2005, The first photograph of New Year’s Eve fireworks taken by Amura from the summit of Mount Vesuvius.
2016, Mario Amura on Mount Faito.
NAPEX 410130 (2014), exhibited at the Real Albergo dei Poveri.
A ritual observed for over fifteen years.
Since 2010, every 31 December, Mario Amura climbs with a crew of friends to the summit of Monte Faito, the mountain that overlooks the Gulf of Naples, facing Vesuvius. From that height, and at that distance, the hundreds of thousands of fireworks set off at the same instant by the people of Vesuvius compose a scene without equal, in which microcosm and macrocosm merge.
Between Photography and Painting
In the works of Napoli Explosion, photography, painting and reportage converge and blur into one another. The trails of the fireworks evoke now a pond of water lilies, now a seabed teeming with jellyfish, now the constellations of a distant sky. Salvatore Settis has described them as "pictorial hypotheses": images suspended between abstract art and a new figuration, in which every form suggests something other than itself, except Vesuvius.
NAPEX 241066 – Napoli Explosion – Mario Amura
NAPEX 241001 – Napoli Explosion – Mario Amura
The exhibition at the Cellaio revealed the kinship between Amura's photography and painting; the exhibition at the Albergo dei Poveri takes a giant step forward: his photographs now resemble matter even more than painting. Fabric, slate, blood, gold: these are images that reach modern painting history by another route, when, at the beginning of the 20th century, matter replaced image, giving rise to abstraction and the informal, new narratives of the rêverie and intelligence of the world.
Sylvain Bellenger
NAPEX 233052 – Napoli Explosion – Mario Amura
the inverted iconography of vesuvius.
For centuries Vesuvius has been depicted as a source of fire: in the gouaches of the Grand Tour, in the canvases of Volaire and Turner, and on through Warhol's silkscreens, the volcano is coloured by the lava that floods it. Napoli Explosion subverts this image. Vesuvius appears as a silent shadow, engulfed by the eruption of light and colour unleashed by the landscape that surrounds it.
Volaire – The Eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 1779. Oil on canvas.
NAPEX 410378 – Napoli Explosion – Mario Amura
Sylvain Bellenger gives voice to the works and coherence to the exhibition.
As curator of the exhibition, Sylvain Bellenger shaped the critical narrative that accompanies the entire visitor journey. He wrote the texts devoted to the works and themes of Napoli Explosion, drawing connections between light, time, Vesuvius, photography and collective memory. He also selected and positioned throughout the exhibition reflections by Salvatore Settis and Erri De Luca. The result is a continuous critical thread that lends each image context and depth without ever eclipsing its power: a voice that guides the gaze and accompanies visitors from one work to the next.
Sylvain Bellenger – Director Emeritus, Museo e Real Bosco di Capodimonte
Napoli Explosion at the centre of international museum attention.
During its five-month run Napoli Explosion was visited by art historians, curators and directors of major international institutions. The Real Albergo dei Poveri also hosted a session of the EDI Global Forum 2026the Fondazione Morra Greco initiative devoted to innovation in museum education and directed by Sylvain Bellenger, bringing together 94 museums and organisations from 23 countries.The programme included a dedicated visit to the exhibition entitled Napoli Explosion: Photography, Popular Culture, Anthropology, Mythology.
On separate occasions, the exhibition was also visited by Glenn D. Lowry, Director Emeritus of MoMA; Salvatore Settis, President of the Louvre’s Scientific Committee; Dominique de Font-Réaulx, General Curator at the Louvre and one of the foremost scholars of the relationship between painting and photography; and Chiara Rostagno, Deputy Director General of the Pinacoteca di Brera. These were four distinct encounters, each unfolding through an extended dialogue with the artist and a close examination of the works.
Glenn D. Lowry – Director Emeritus, MoMA (New York)
Mario Amura with art historian Salvatore Settis and Professor Michela Sassi
Dominique de Font-Réaulx, General Curator at the Louvre, with Mario Amura
The wonder of more than one hundred thousand gazes.
Over the course of more than five months, and following two extensions, more than one hundred thousand people passed through the rooms of the Real Albergo dei Poveri. Among them, at least forty thousand students, from primary school to university, encountered Napoli Explosion as an experience of discovery, wonder and participation. Nine guest books were filled with more than twenty thousand messages, drawings and expressions of appreciation. These are not merely figures: they are the trace of an exhibition capable of speaking to different generations and transforming each visit into a shared memory.
NYA – Now Your Art:
every visitor creates their own Napoli Explosion.
By wearing the virtual reality headset, visitors join the Napoli Explosion on Monte Faito just moments before midnight on 31 December. Before them, the Gulf of Naples ignites around Vesuvius. Holding a virtual camera in their hands, they can move within the scene and transform the gesture of the hand and the light of the fireworks into their own unique work. During the exhibition at the Real Albergo dei Poveri, more than 11,000 works: a vast collective archive destined to become an autonomous exhibition.
Mario Nucibello and Angelo Faella during the development of NYA
Cristina Ascione, Napex Team
Fifteen Years of Napoli Explosion, told by those who lived it.
In the cinema room, the documentary Napoli Explosion the key stages of fifteen years of ongoing research: from the earliest intuitions concerning the relationship between the New Year’s Eve ritual and Vesuvius, to the expeditions to Monte Faito and the creation of the works and exhibitions. The narrative brings Mario Amura’s voice together with those of art historian Salvatore Settis, curator Sylvain Bellenger, and several members of the crew, including Serenella Iovino, an ecocritical theorist and scholar of environmental cultures, and Serafino Murri. It also features Bruno Di Marino, a historian of visual culture and audiovisual languages.
The yellow room preserves the genealogy of Napoli Explosion.
In the Yellow Room, alongside NYA – Now Your Art, illuminated display cases bring together photographs that trace the long genealogy from which Napoli Explosion emerged. This is not a biography separate from the project, but the account of an artistic investigation developed over time: an enduring attention to light, movement, duration, and the possibility of transforming a real event into an image. From Mario Amura’s earliest experiments to the nights spent on Monte Faito, the display reveals how Napoli Explosion grew out of a way of seeing shaped over the years and continues to evolve today.
Napoli Explosion Vol. 2: The Exhibition Artbook
Published on the occasion of the exhibition at the Real Albergo dei Poveri, Mario Amura: Napoli Explosion vol. 2 continues the publishing project begun with the first volume, produced for the exhibition at the Museo e Real Bosco di Capodimonte. The artbook brings together 92 photographic paintings created over more than fifteen years of research, accompanied by texts by Sylvain Bellenger, Erri De Luca, Serafino Murri and Salvatore Settis. Signed by the artist and limited to 500 copies, the volume documents a new chapter in the evolution of Napoli Explosion.
