Two volumes gathering pictures and texts that tell "the parable of an industrial town", Quattordio, a village in Piedmont home to a major chemical plant producing paints and insulation. From 1935 two brilliant engineers founded four companies from nothing that came to employ about three thousand people; among the products made there are the famous Ferrari red and the trails of the Frecce Tricolori. In 2011 the town asked a research laboratory of the University of Eastern Piedmont to help it understand why the local community was so reluctant to take part in social life: "why do the people of Quattordio keep to themselves?" The research answers by studying the passage from rapid, paternalistic industrialisation to the present, where the local factories have become peripheral branches of multinationals. One volume collects interviews with the inhabitants; the other opens with a conversation with Gianni Berengo Gardin and presents the pictures the author, a sociologist of territory making his debut as a photographer, took after the interviews.