Pompeii is not a place of the past. It is a place in which the past has never ceased to be present. Beneath the feet of those who walk there today, beneath the fields and the roads and the houses, lies a city that was buried in a single day. But above that city another grew — and then another still. Layers of life, of faith, of daily work. Vesuvius looming over everything, silent and immense, like a presence that is never named but never forgotten. This project was born from a gaze that did not want to choose between the before and the after. Between the excavations and the modern streets, between the archaeological site and the living city that grows around it. Between the tourists photographing columns and the inhabitants who open their shops every morning a few steps away from two thousand years of history. Pompeii is all of this at once death and continuity, ruin and resistance, the sacred and the everyday. The Basilica of Santa Maria del Rosario rising where there was once only ash. The fertile fields that owe their richness to the very eruption that destroyed everything. The photographs gathered in this project — and in the published volume that accompanies them  do not seek the monument. They seek the passage: that thin point where ancient time and present time touch, blur, and recognise each other.