When the sky is covered in threads of gold, something shifts: the spectacle turns into spiritual revelation. In Naples, fireworks are neither entirely profane, nor truly sacred: they constitute an ambiguous ritual, halfway between pagan and devout, popular and sacred. They celebrate the passing of time and, at the same moment, exorcise it, for every anniversary, every New Year’s Eve, is a conspiracy against the passing of time. In a city built upon a crater, these explosions symbolically recall the eruptions of Vesuvius: they celebrate the flash, the terror, and the dangerous beauty of the volcano. Fireworks become an anthropological gesture, a collective catharsis against the ancestral fear of the explosive mountain, a way of making it visible by overturning, for one night, the order of the world, as in carnival. But here, it is gold that imposes itself as a register of the sacred.Napex 241001

Sylvain Bellenger