Thirty years after Hands over the City, Rosi returns to Naples and finds the same city of entrenched corruption, impassioned debate, and ruined beauty, but also another city, of memory and of the mind. A screening of Hands at the School of Architecture is the occasion for a prismatic discussion of the city's troubles, then and now; students and historians, politicians and industrialists, architects and environmentalists each speak their piece. However, the kids who deal drugs for the Camorra seem less concerned with the Southern Question than with their own survival, while Rosi turns toward history and his own past, placing clips from his earlier films alongside images of the ruins of Pompeii. If Rosi's diary documents a place in perpetual crisis, it also harbors hope: the footage of collapse from Hands over the City runs backwards, and the ruined city rises again.