THE VILLAGE
A workers’ neighbourhood becomes a living archive as Virginia Cassano photographs the people, streets, and memories that continue to shape Villaggio Piaggio.
July 5, 2026
INTERVIEW
PHOTOGRAPHY Virginia Cassano
INTERVIEW Melanie Meggs
Some neighborhoods are not simply lived in. They are inherited through stories, families, work, grief, habit, and the memories that continue to shape them. Virginia Cassano enters Villaggio Piaggio from a position of personal inheritance, as the daughter of a factory worker who died too soon. Through this intimate connection, she examines how labor and collective memory remain embedded in the life of a place. The project unfolds in Pontedera, the Tuscan town that adopted Virginia ten years ago. Within it sits Villaggio Piaggio, a neighbourhood built in 1934 for the workers of the Piaggio factory and still physically present yet suspended within its own history.
Virginia was born in Bari, where she studied art history and fashion. Art was part of her life from the beginning, shaped in part by her father, whose encouragement became an enduring source of direction. At fifteen, he gave her his Olympus OM10 and enrolled her in an evening photography course. That early gift of a camera still has a quiet influence on this project. For Virginia, photography is not only a medium of looking. It is a way of returning, asking, sensing, and holding what cannot be restored.
Since moving to Tuscany, Virginia has described rediscovering the value of time and humanity. In this project, that attention becomes a method. She does not photograph Pontedera as a fixed historical subject. She photographs it as a field of lived memory, where former workers, elderly residents, windows, courtyards, stairwells, benches, smoke, rooms, and streets become part of one emotional structure. The former workers are not symbols of an industrial past. They are witnesses, carriers, and protagonists.
These photographs listen to the Villaggio, staying close to the memories, silences, and traces it still carries. Virginia understands that memory is unstable. It moves through silence, gesture, remembered stories, and the body’s response to place. Her black and white images strip the world back to light and shadow. The blur becomes a way of thinking. The darkness becomes a form of care. What emerges is nostalgia with weight, a feeling tied to place, time, and what remains.
“For me, it was very important to go beyond a documentary record. That already exists in the books at the Piaggio Museum. During the period when I was merely taking photographic notes, I wondered what the right approach would be to create a different kind of narrative whilst still respecting the historical aspect and the brief given to the collective. I found the answer in family albums – in my own album at home, with photos of my father in his blue overalls on his first day at work, or during the first strike. I sought out the protagonists; I recreated and relived the emotions, the sense of belonging to places and activities, that resilience and survival in the face of change, and the children who studied and moved away, leaving their elderly parents in the same house with their memories.”
IN CONVERSATION WITH VIRGINIA CASSANO
TPL: At fifteen, your father gave you an Olympus OM10 and enrolled you in an evening photography course. What do you remember about that first encounter with photography?
VIRGINIA: I realised straight away that simply ‘clicking’ the shutter button wasn’t enough to take a good photograph, and that with just the basics and a bit of experimentation, I’d only ever produce pretty pictures. It could become a means of creative expression, but I needed to study the great masters of the past and look at a lot of contemporary photography to stimulate the process, starting to ask myself the right questions, in the complete naivety of youth. With the awareness I have today, I take photographs whilst asking myself why I take them, what stories I want to tell and, above all, why. I’m no longer interested in whether the photos are beautiful, but whether they work, whether they strike a chord and whether they are consistent with my artistic language.
TPL: You studied art history and fashion before committing more fully to photography. How have those earlier studies shaped the way you compose, observe, and build atmosphere in your images?
VIRGINIA: I am convinced that photography requires a culture of its own – not necessarily an artistic one – because it encourages the development of one’s own way of thinking, stimulates a certain curiosity about the world’s objects and stories, and fosters an aptitude for framing situations. Studying the history of art and fashion has taught me to appreciate ‘beauty’ in terms of composition and the way light falls on bodies and within spaces. In search of a harmony that the eye recognises and finds satisfying.
TPL: You describe Pontedera as the Tuscan town that adopted you ten years ago. What did you first notice about the place, and when did it begin to feel photographically important to you? How did your father’s memory shape the emotional direction of this project?
VIRGINIA: It all began when my mentor and teacher, the photographer Fabio Moscatelli, invited me to join a collective project to portray the suburbs, moving away from the usual clichéd narrative of decay, drug dealing and hardship on the city’s outskirts. Every photographer across the country was asked to portray a specific area in a wholly personal and unconventional way. It was then that I began to look at my city with fresh eyes, discovering the boundary walls of a working-class neighbourhood behind the Piaggio factory, where the legendary Vespa is produced. In the post-war period, it was a privilege to live within the ‘Villaggio’; today, it is a suburb in the city centre, with new families of immigrants who inhabit, bring life to and keep the neighbourhood and its amenities alive. I lost my father far too soon, but I remember his routine at the factory and his shifts. I sought out those memories in the lives of retired factory workers, imagining that this might have been my family’s life. The details of their homes, their daily lives and their stories moved me deeply, and I let myself be guided by this, capturing images that felt like ‘déjà vu’.
TPL: Villaggio Piaggio carries a strong history of labor, family, and industrial life. What did you want to understand about this neighborhood that history alone could not tell you?
VIRGINIA: I wanted to delve deeper into the stories of a glorious era and seek out the testimonies of former workers at the Piaggio Village, who speak of a world in which private life and factory work were inextricably linked. The sense of community was incredibly strong; they remember the Village not merely as a collection of houses, but as one big extended family. Being a ‘Piaggista’ meant sharing work shifts, shopping at the staff shops and spending leisure time together. I wanted to seek them out, to make them the protagonists of a story that belongs to them and has not yet been told through photography. A story that has also become my own, with such a vast amount of photographic material that it is difficult to use it all. Nothing was to be left behind.
TPL: When photographing former workers of the Piaggio factory, how did you begin those encounters, and what role did conversation, time, and trust play in the process?
VIRGINIA: Conversation is everything! Listening is key. As I said earlier, I started by taking ‘photographic notes’, stopping people to ask a few quick questions and introducing my project. In the suburbs, you find so much warmth and humanity, and when you’re genuinely interested in people’s stories, it’s easy to be inundated with anecdotes. You just need to listen and ask questions. You need to go back several times to interview people, to understand and get to know them, and only then do they recognise you and introduce you to other neighbours who welcome you into their homes to share another life story, with trust and enthusiasm. It’s wonderful to shine a light on them, to give a voice to ordinary people and share their stories with others – stories that otherwise no one would ever have heard.
TPL: You have described photography as an extension of your thoughts and emotions. What does the camera allow you to reach that words cannot?
VIRGINIA: The camera goes where words fall short. It captures the body language and micro-expressions of the speaker, revealing what people truly feel, not just what they say. It is a spontaneous truth that cannot be filtered in the same way as words. It means capturing the unconscious – a habitual pattern of movement that is more interesting than the speech itself. Often, scenes emerge that I already had within me, in my memory – situations I’ve experienced, or photographs I’ve studied that have left a lasting impression on me. It’s like reliving them and freezing them in time.
Long-term projects enrich you through reflections, anecdotes and new friendships.
TPL: You describe the work as a visual transposition of a “viscous” feeling. What does that word mean to you, and how did you try to translate it into images?
VIRGINIA: Having manual control in the camera is essential for me; I need to get the balance of elements just right for that particular situation. Often, an interesting photo arises from a mistake, just as is often the case in baking. I believe that what is considered wrong or a mistake in photography is, in reality, a race against time that slips away; you race faster than emotions and sensations, but you produce ‘dirtier’ images, which slip away almost slimy because they belong to a flashback, a memory, a moment that has already passed. This work contains a great deal of historical and personal memory; I find it natural that ‘dense’ images have emerged – images that have their own aesthetic, yet are vibrant with voices, echoes and shadows.
TPL: Who or what has inspired the way you think about photography, memory, and human stories? This could be artists, writers, films, places, or people from your own life.
VIRGINIA: I think of photography as a single frame from a film. For me, it’s like rewinding the film of my childhood. My father was also a videographer, so my imagination was always working overtime as I watched him edit the tapes, record the music and write the titles – all done analogue and by hand. My photography is influenced by my life experiences, the books I’ve read and the films I’ve seen. At some point, you recognise those frames; you rediscover them today. There are so many contemporary photographers who inspire me every day, from Alec Soth to Martin Bogren, Jassie Lenz, Elinor Carucci, Simona Ghizzoni, and many others. Filmmakers such as Wim Wenders or the great Italian directors of Neorealism, but literature also plays a fundamental role: writers who explore memory and identity inspire me to seek poetry in the little things. A good photograph must do what a great book does: suggest a story, evoke an atmosphere and leave room for the viewer’s imagination.
TPL: What would we find in your camera bag and is there one piece of equipment that is on your wish list?
VIRGINIA: My camera bag is small; I always use my mirrorless camera and almost always with the same 18–55 f/2.8 lens. I was a Nikon user for years, but I’ve now switched to Fujifilm. I’ve never felt the need for cameras that perform any better than this; I’ve just upgraded my kit every five years, mainly so that I can get excellent image quality straight out of the camera and minimise the amount of post-production work.
TPL: Do you collect anything from the places you photograph, such as art, notes, objects, sounds, or conversations?
VIRGINIA: Absolutely. Notes, audio recordings of interviews, group photos, funny selfies with people, books and gifts I’ve been given.
TPL: What would you like to understand more deeply through photography over the next few years?
VIRGINIA: I’d like to create a project with a social theme. To document a reality far removed from my own, focusing on volunteering, education and disability. Recently, I’ve begun to observe the changes in my mum: her progressive forgetfulness, her routine that seems unchanged, yet she herself is changing slowly and inexorably. This new state of health, as well as being painful for me, is challenging because it is extremely difficult for me to photograph her whilst being fully aware of her condition.
TPL: When you are not photographing, what do you do for pleasure, rest, or to return to yourself?
VIRGINIA: I never stop taking photographs with my eyes. I see beautiful and interesting things everywhere, even in the less attractive things. It happens when I’m out jogging, when I’m travelling, or when I go to the cinema. When I talk to people and observe them. In my spare time, I look at a lot of photography by other young photographers online or at exhibitions.
