The hills of Naples. A terrace overlooking the panorama: the houses, the Gulf, the port and the Vesuvius in the background. Thousand lights flicker. The dawn is coming. The city wakes up slowly, while the sky clears.
In an enchanted garden, with puppets everywhere, also hanging from the trees, some children are sitting on the grass, waiting, quiver, with smiling faces in front of a puppet theatre with its curtain closed. The show is about to begin. "Once upon a time there was a King, nay ... There once was a Kingdom called Campania Felix, where the land was fertile and beautiful and the people had so much good stuff to eat and was happy ... "
In such a way the story of Pulcinella begins. His voice and his face symbol of Neapolitan culture abroad, will be the underlying theme that will cross the entire documentary. It will tell the story of a land that once was fertile and happy, but now it's transformed into the Land of the fires, a sad place, full of smoke, poisoned food and diseases; a land that become a sort of "dustbin of Italy", a land to regain and rebuild.
Numerous reports, surveys and articles have described the problem of environmental pollution in Campania (a region in the South of Italy), that many people now call Land of the fires.
Here comes the need to tell about the Land of the fires from another point of view: by making a documentary that isn't just a complaint, but also reflects the fragility of the human condition, of people afraid because they're victim of larger interests.
This documentary is a real journey of faces and stories: Carmine Schiavone - a Camorra turncoat, who, for more than twenty years, has been denouncing the devastation of Campania, perpetrated by the organised crime in accordance with some corrupt companies - tells about the traffic of toxic waste in his last appearance on video, filmed shortly before his death; the activists who thirteen years ago already fought against the spillage of toxic waste; Don Maurizio Patriciello, the priest symbol of the struggle against the destruction of the Campania region; mothers who lost their children; medicine doctors; children frightened by the food they eat, the air they breathe, the water they drink.
These people all share the same fear and the same anxieties, because they all live under the same sky, in which the fires disperse the fumes they produce. Fil rouge of the film will be the mask of Pulcinella, thanks to the puppet master Bruno Leone and his puppet theatre.
The figure of Pulcinella, in fact, has not only an historical, artistic and cultural significance, but it is also a symbol of social protest. Metaphorically, the mask symbolises the Neapolitan mob, tired of being abused and humiliated, that rebels against a power which is often inhumane.
Pulcinella asserts his will to live and overcome obstacles and it's a mask that knows no borders: in France is known and loved as Polichinelle, in Germany as Kaspar, England Punch, and so on.
That's the reason why it is the perfect guide for the spectators through the emotional journey aroused by the character's voices and by the images of the area, in some cases devastated, in other ones luxuriant and florid like the ancient Campania Felix.