In a scene seemingly ripped from the plots of disaster classics Dante’s Peak, Volcano, and The Day After Tomorrow, the Washington Post reports that Pozzuoli, Italy Mayor Luigi Manzoni says maverick government volcanologist Giuseppe Mastrolorenzo is just fearmongering and even though the recent swarm of earthquakes and hydrothermal activity coming from the nearby Phlegraean Fields caldera are concerning, there’s nothing for residents to be worried about, the town’s totally safe.

“It’s Italy! The earth moves! Meanwhile I’ve got Genco Worldwide Olive Oil coming here looking to build a €50 million bottling plant and this fugazi is trying to scare them off with all this talk of a giant eruption coming out of the ground! Pozzuoli’s economy can’t afford this loose cannon shooting his mouth off,” we imagine Manzoni to have shouted at a town council meeting while Mastrolorenzo held up the latest seismometer readings showing the magma is surging and a major eruption is imminent.

“With all due respect Signor Mayor, I don’t give a damn about your olive oil plant or your reelection campaign. I don’t do politics. I do science. And the science right here says you’re about to lose city hall in a landslide,” said Mastrolorenzo as the musical score made a dramatic pause.

“OF LAVA!” the volcanologist added just as Manzoni’s loyal cops circled around Mastrolorenzo and the mayor screamed “GET THAT CRAZY SON OF A BITCH OUT OF MY COUNCIL ROOM!” Then cut to the volcanologist sitting at a bar downing shot after shot of whiskey while his boss reams him out in text messages about how the mayor has powerful friends in the prime minister’s office – who controls the geology institute’s budget. Mastrolorenzo shuts off his phone and stares into space.

The attractive and sympathetic 50-something bartender lady – who several scenes earlier winked at Mastrolorenzo when she was recommending a good motel – begins what at first seems like an unrelated piece of dialogue: Explaining to a young waiter that he needed to open the colder bottles of Peroni and not the ones they just stocked because the warmer beer gets too foamy, immediately prompting the brave volcanologist to slap a €50 note on the bar and bolt out the door…

Anyway the Post really did write this paragraph: “Some of [Mastrolorenzo’s] own bosses – as well as Pozzuoli’s Mayor Luigi Manzoni – dismiss such talk as fearmongering. There is no need to abandon this sun-kissed land now, they say. The danger is serious but manageable; the threat of a major eruption remote. The bigger threat, they say, would be a new wave of volcanic earthquakes. But it can be managed, they say, without the kind of costly evacuations and building reinforcements that occurred in the 1980s, the last time the Phlegraean Fields rumbled to life.”