Why do we consider it ethnographic?We are used to thinking of brand design projects as affirmative processes, forceful actions to combat stagnation in market dynamics, to provide new momentum, and to once again arouse attention in the minds of users. But what happens when an identity project is tackled by addressing complex scenarios? We call branding projects applied to territories and communities "complex" when the material of identity becomes, by its very nature, atomized, variable, and subject to factors that do not allow us to consider it unique and certain. In our professional history, there have been many cases where we have faced this theme and developed a work methodology that exploits an ethnographic approach to the project. This was also the case for the important identity and communication project applied to the village of Castelnuovo D’Avane, an ancient Tuscan town in the Valdarno region in the Municipality of Cavriglia. This is one of the Italian villages nominated by our regions as part of the PNRR, which financed its many regeneration programs, and our involvement was requested specifically to work on the visual identity that would have to accompany the entire process of regeneration and reconstruction.

This courageous and important rebirth operation, nominated by the Tuscany Region for the national program, was able to count on strategic collaborations such as the one with Studio Archea of architect Marco Casamonti or the planning and programming capacity of the Fondazione Promo PA. In cases like these, we are not (only) talking about real estate reconstruction operations or a generic vocation for tourist attractiveness; the rebirth of a village is, in general, an operation that must deal with multiple expectations of re-employment, of rebuilding vocations for citizenship and residency capable, yes, of accounting for memories but also of recomposing a community able to sustain itself economically and reconstruct forms of social coexistence. In this case, the complexity was increased by the enormous weight of historical memory that Castelnuovo D’Avane carries with it. An ancient history of mining economy—lignite was extracted here, that fossil coal which was the first oil of an Italy approaching modernity and the first electrical conduits that replaced gas for urban lighting. But miners and mines also gave birth here to the first labor protest movements; anarchism was Tuscan and was born right here in the Valdarno. Here, one of the most serious Nazi massacres of the Second World War was experienced, the scars of which families still carry and the losses of which they still suffer. Meanwhile, lignite became economically unprofitable unless intensively quarried, and so those large cranes requested from RUR Germany were needed—the great mechanical dragons that entirely excavated the hill on which the old town rested. Thus it was that, expropriated by Enel, from the 80s until the mid-90s, the village was progressively evacuated because it no longer had the land on which to stand.