Portrait of the city of Pozzuoli, an ancient town built under a volcano overlooking the bay near Naples. It was the home of the paranoid emperor Nero, who had his mother Agrippina murdered, imagining she aspired to the throne. This history pervades a 1970's set story about a poor fishing family whose beloved home, wracked by earthquakes, is declaired uninhabitable. They are forced to move to the country, where the close family falls apart and the patriarch, Don Salvatore, dies, longing for the sea. contemporary events.