Naples welcomed the new year in the way only Naples knows how: lighting up the sky with fireworks, lights, choruses, and the classic New Year’s Eve explosions. Mario Amura, photographer and visual artist, has spent the New Year’s Eve night for the past fourteen years on Mount Faito, the mountain that rises above the Gulf of Naples – in front of Vesuvius – to capture that ancient ritual.

Art historian Salvatore Settis described Amura’s project as follows: Napoli Explosion is an autobiographical work, a hymn to the city of Naples itself. The result is seen in this extraordinary video, and is also contained in a "Napoli Explosion," an art book in a limited signed edition of 400 copies, which collects 116 photographic paintings, published simultaneously with the exhibition at the Museo e Real Bosco di Capodimonte.

"The window of my bedroom," says Amura, "faced the Vesuvius, and every morning, with reverence, I would whisper good morning to it, as one does when addressing someone sleeping, fearing to wake them. The volcano is a living presence for anyone who lives at its foot. For over 12 years, on New Year’s Eve, my crew and I climb Mount Faito, a mountain overlooking the Bay of Naples, to capture the extraordinary choreography of lights and colors created by the fireworks around Vesuvius. Through this superstitious and propitiatory ritual, the people of Naples welcome the new year. The image of the volcano’s black, silent silhouette submerged in the noise and colors of the fireworks seemed to me a representation that needed to be pursued seriously and through many different paths. Over the years, the project has evolved into an experimentation with new forms of writing with light, using a unique color palette provided by the hundreds of thousands of fireworks exploding simultaneously. "Napoli Explosion" has thus become a work in search of the sentiment of light."