Francesco Mazzei is one of those bright, exceptionally talented young people which our small town of Peccioli produces only once or twice per generation. Self-taught, he arrived at photography and artistic creation modestly by technique. After a long apprenticeship with the photographer and filmmaker Luca Bracali, the young man, naturally gifted for handling drones, editing videos and photographic retouching, continues to collaborate on Italian television without neglecting his more personal creation which culminated in 2021 with a video on Peccioli presented at the Venice Biennale and a photo of Ghizzano village published in National Geographic.

Francesco’s photographs, whether taken from the sky or from the ground, are all imbued with the same lyrical realism: he captures the poetry of Tuscan natural and urban landscapes in the light of blue mornings or rosy late afternoons and, far from the clichés on eternal Tuscany, immerses them in a very personal dreamlike atmosphere which reconstructs a new reality freed from all gravity.

He gave us wonderfully poetic views of Villa Cosmiana, its gardens and its vineyards, yet it is when this realism escapes him and his photos become pure pictorial creations that he excels; the unidentifiable vineyards become interlaced with zebra stripes, the gardens metamorphose into abstract compositions, even the objects lose their meaning to become nothing but the interactions of shapes and colours… a true work of a painter indeed, of a poet.