SCAMPIA, THE VELA BUILDINGS AND THE VOID THEY LEAVE BEHIND
Photo-essay
Anyone who knows me and follows my work knows that I’ve never been interested in beauty or luxury. I am drawn instead to humanity and to the outskirts. I am interested in suffering—but even more than suffering itself, I care about the stories of people who suffer, struggle, and do everything they can to survive.
Over the years, I’ve worked and photographed in the peripheries of Serbia, Ethiopia, Uganda, Lebanon—and as I write this, I am in Jordan. Yet I could not avoid returning once more to the Vele of Scampia: a place I know deeply, and where, in some way, I grew up.
In 2020, my producer Gaetano Di Vaio asked me to write and direct a documentary about the demolition of the Vele. I titled it “Addio dolce casa mia” (Goodbye, My Sweet Home).
The process began with the Green Vela, known as “the Tower.” It was January. It was cold—just like now.
The Green Vela was demolished on February 20, 2020.
Today, all the Vele are empty.
Only the Celeste Vela remains standing. It will not be demolished, but “reinterpreted” as a multifunctional civic space within Naples’ urban regeneration plan. What that truly means remains unclear.
According to the official schedule of the Municipality of Naples, the first new residential buildings should be delivered by 2026, with the entire regeneration project completed by 2028.
Six years have already passed.
Before the demolitions truly moved forward, the Vele continued to claim victims. I think of the collapse of a walkway in the Celeste Vela on July 22, 2024—a failure that was not only structural, but symbolic. It marked the definitive end of a time that could no longer be postponed.
This is why I feel the need to tell their story once again.
I will never be able to consider the Vele ugly, nor simply a failed experiment by architect Francesco Di Salvo. They were never just concrete and decay. They were an organism, a breath—an architecture that absorbed life and gave it back.
Without denying their well-known criminal history, to me the Vele were often—without glory—the mother of the abandoned: of those who lost their jobs, who occupied out of desperation, who could no longer afford rent and chose the Vele over sleeping under bridges. The stories I collected for Addio dolce casa mia speak precisely of this: people who resisted, restarted, and survived thanks to the Vele.
I have always felt a strong need to tell the story of part of my neighborhood. I say “part” because I am only half from Secondigliano. My father was born and raised there; my mother is from central Naples. That in-between condition allowed me to truly know this area—to live it with school friends and cousins, to play football there, to cross its streets again and again.
Scampia, with its Vele, was legendary—wrapped in myths of danger and crime. I never fully believed them. Or rather, only partially.
My aunt Mena lived in one of the Vele for five years in the early 1990s, after my uncle lost his job. I was very young when I visited. What I remember most are the endless walkways, the dim light, the sense that the buildings were breathing—sounds everywhere, the structure open and tense like a sail in the wind, filled with unease and fascination.
Years have passed. My aunt no longer lives there. She managed to get a bigger, more comfortable, more beautiful home.
And yet, I belong to the Vele too. Whether I like it or not, this is the truth.
This work comes from a sense of belonging—real or imagined, declared or hidden—that I feel the urgent need to confront, and above all, to explain to myself. How do we define a non-place that everyone escapes from, yet always returns to in order to feel—tangibly—the authenticity of who we are?
My non-place is anything but abstract. It is physical, real, and deeply inscribed in everything I do.
My non-place is Scampia.
Every time I return to Naples from my travels, I perform two rituals.
The first: I walk through the city at night, crossing its historic heart, breathing it in, letting it realign my bones.
The second: I drive toward Miano, pass Don Guanella, and stop in front of the Vele. A silent pilgrimage. A short stretch of road that feels endless.
I used to climb to the roof of the Celeste Vela, from where I could see them all.
Now that there is emptiness, I feel empty too.
Many have drawn inspiration from Secondigliano and Scampia—journalists, filmmakers, writers. Some have done good work. During my own photographic explorations, I met children, adults, elderly people. They all shared one feeling: pride. Fierce pride in belonging to the Vele, to Scampia.
And perhaps that is what hurts the most today—not the “ugliness” imposed from outside, but the void advancing where once I was, playing football.
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