summary:
Co-written and directed by the award-winning Mario Martone, a prolific Italian filmmaker born in Naples in 1959, Nostalgia unfolds around Felice Lasco. After many years away, including a long sojourn in Egypt, Felice returns to his homeland to reconnect with his aging mother. His departure as a child left a void, and his homecoming becomes a journey through memory, memory that refuses to stay neatly filed away. As he walks the winding streets of the Sanità neighborhood in Naples, the city itself seems to rearrange its stones, its churches, and its history around him. The dialogue of the place feels strange, almost foreign, yet it is a language that belongs to him, a language that memories translate in the mind even when spoken aloud by others.
In this city of capillaries and stairways, Felice experiences a pull toward a life that once existed, a life shared with his closest childhood companion, Oreste. The nostalgia coursing through him is not simply a longing for a person or a moment, but for a complete era that shaped his sense of self. The streets map themselves onto his body as if they remember him first, calling him back to a time when everything felt possible and perilously fragile at the same moment. The film traces how a single place can become a repository of secrets, promises, and unspoken stories, all of which continue to resonate long after the moment of departure.
As the layers of memory unfold, Naples emerges not only as a backdrop but as an active force that tests Felice’s perception of reality. The city’s atmosphere—its sounds, smells, and the cadence of daily life—acts like a living archive, inviting him to reassemble a past that keeps insisting on returning. In this sense, Nostalgia becomes less about longing for a lost person and more about an encounter with a lost self, a person who once walked these same alleys, spoke these same phrases, and believed in a future that now seems both distant and achingly close. The film captures the tension between time that has passed and the present moment that keeps slipping away, a tension that draws Felice deeper into his own memories and the enduring power of his hometown.
Ultimately, the narrative presents nostalgia as an almost irresistible force that transcends logic. It draws him back toward a version of Naples where he feels most himself, where the echo of childhood friendships and shared secrets with Oreste still lingers in the air. The story invites viewers to consider how places can hold us more firmly than we hold them, how recollections can be both comforting and devastating, and how returning home can illuminate what was lost, what remains, and what one still hopes to become. Nostalgia stands as a meditation on memory, place, and the enduring pull of home, showing that some cities are not merely visited but inhabited again inside the heart.