The Vele di Scampia entered the collective imagination through a single lens: organised crime, drug dealing, Gomorra. A symbol of urban decay so powerful it almost entirely obscured the people who lived there, their stories, their everyday lives. It is from this fracture between public narrative and human reality that Something Went Wrong was born — the photography project by Massimo Pellone, begun in April 2017 and dedicated to the Vele di Scampia.

Over seven years, Massimo Pellone moved through those spaces, knocked on doors, sat at kitchen tables. The people he met welcomed him, shared their stories, showed him their homes. The project does not seek answers, but asks questions about the human story of a neighbourhood abandoned first by the Camorra and then by institutions, left to itself in an indefinite and suspended time.

Built in the 1970s by architect Franz Di Salvo as a model of social housing, the Vele were meant to accommodate hundreds of families. There were seven of them. Over time, they became a symbol of marginalisation and institutional abandonment: the 1980 Irpinia earthquake, the absence of the state, and the entrenchment of organised crime had turned the area into one of the largest open-air drug markets in Europe. Demolitions began in the 1990s. Today only the Vela Celeste still stands.

But Something Went Wrong does not tell the story of the Vele as a backdrop. It tells it through the people who lived there. Stories of extreme poverty, scattered families, lives built at the margins of every social safety net. The urban renewal initiative known as Restart Scampia triggered a displacement of residents, forced to move into crumbling buildings with no certainty of being included in the municipal census that should guarantee them housing in future reconstructions.