Where it was filmed 'Kryptonite!'

The film was filmed and is set in 1970s Naples, a city that is transgressive yet poetic, colourful and gloomy, especially in the scenes filmed on the seafront in winter and in the rain. Peppino is a ‘special’ child, who makes up for his loneliness with his fervid imagination, and is surrounded by a rather over-the-top family.

Every morning, his mother Rosaria takes him to school, passing through the streets of the historic centre and through the Galleria Umberto I. One day, when she picks him up from school, she sits him down on the edge of the fountain in the cloister of the Boarding School of the Church of Sant’Eligio Maggiore, in Via di Napoli a short distance away from the small courtyard where Peppino’s fellow students play ball using him as lookout.

The coloured houses of Procida welcome Rosaria and Peppino, on a journey which, for her, is tainted with regret of her long lost youth, while from Terra Murata, a fortified village on the highest point on the island, she describes to her son what he can’t see, both because he is short-sighted and because she is describing things that exist only in her memories.

Peppino’s aunt and uncle, Titina and Salvatore, are two hippies trying to find themselves, in feminist groups where no one is afraid to practise nudity and parties in clubs where, between artificial drugs and loose morals, the watchword is transgression. During one of these parties, at the Mostra d’Oltremare, a group of Greek students involves them in a lively Sirtaki.

Peppino’s father, unfaithful and clumsy, does what he can: he divides his attention between his depressed wife, his needy lover, and distracting his son, for example on the fairground rides in Piazza Mercato, while he entertains himself not far away.