Where’s Picone? 1984

During a heated debate at Naples’ town hall in the early 1980s, Pasquale Picone [Tommaso Palladino]—a former Italsider worker who has just lost his job—pulls out a jerrycan of gasoline and sets himself alight in front of the Municipal Council. His wife Teresa [Clelia Rondinella] and her three children are left in the dark as an ambulance arrives with unusual haste and then disappears with him on board.

Desperate for news, the wife hires a peculiar kind of private eye: Salvatore Cannavacciuolo [Giancarlo Giannini], a man who makes a living by offering information to people visiting the morgue for a thousand lire per clue. Salvatore, whose motivations are far from noble, takes the case with a mix of opportunism and curiosity, hoping to turn the revelations into a profitable lead.

As he digs, he discovers that Pasquale Picone never actually worked for Italsider; the job was only a cover to hide a sprawling network of contraband, gambling, and explicit connections to the Camorra. Intrigued by the potential payoff, Salvatore plunges deeper into Picone’s secret life, and the investigation careens between farcical missteps and genuinely dangerous discoveries.

The film stands as one of the late examples of the Commedia all’Italiana, braided with a detective story that keeps the tone playful while never fully losing its bite. Naples itself pulses at the heart of the narrative, painting a portrait of a city where ordinary figures become entangled in extraordinary twists.

Along the way, a vivid gallery of Neapolitan characters crosses Salvatore’s path: Cocò [Aldo Giuffrè], a streetwise figure with his own codes; Don Armando Bellucore [Remo Remotti], a formidable local power; Barone Armato [Carlo Croccolo], a caricature of aristocratic presence; two Italsider workers, Italo Celoro and Carmine Faraco, whose everyday lives brush against the industrial edge of the city; and Antonio Allocca as the hospital usher, among others. The ensemble texture turns the pursuit into a sprawling, human-sized mosaic of Naples at a crossroads, where humor and danger coexist in uneasy balance.