The project — Vespri

Vespri is run by Michele Casella, who has worked for years in an engineering research and development setting in the automotive and industrial industries, with a background spanning economics and data analysis: a degree in Economics and Finance from the Università degli Studi di Palermo, an Erasmus exchange in International Economics and Public Policy at Johannes Gutenberg Universität in Mainz, and a master's in Economics and Data Analysis from the Università degli Studi di Verona, with coursework in time series, machine learning and econometrics.

The role covers business case development, tracking of project progress and related cash flows, high-level reporting — from a single business unit to global company scale — and building custom Python applications to automate otherwise manual analytical processes. It's the same toolkit applied here to engineering industries: data collection, structured monitoring, communicating results to decision-makers. Earlier experience on the sales side added a specific grounding in reading commercial trends in the industrial vehicles segment.

Full professional profile on LinkedIn. The code for the data collection and processing projects is public on GitHub.

Vespri takes its name from a historic event of strong reaction, and looks at the present with the same spirit: it observes how companies and governments interact, and the consequences that follow — on the financial front, in the strategies that gradually take shape and, step by step, end up writing history.

The tagline, "Ricerca e Reazione" ("Research and Reaction"), describes the two-phase method. Research is the collection and verification of data: stated sources, explicit limits, no shortcuts. Reaction is what that discipline allows you to read — how a company or a government responds to an event, what financial consequences follow, what strategies emerge from that response and, over time, help determine the trajectory of an entire industry.

The name recalls the Sicilian Vespers of 1282: the uprising with which the Sicilian people rose against Angevin rule, ending a government imposed from afar. Starting in Palermo on Easter Monday, the revolt spread across the whole island within days and led, within a few years, to the end of Angevin rule in Sicily. It has remained, in Sicilian memory, the symbol of a people that does not passively submit but reacts. Read more on Wikipedia.

The Sicilian Vespers, painting by Francesco Hayez depicting the 1282 popular uprising in Palermo — Francesco Hayez, "The Sicilian Vespers," 1844-46 — Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna, Rome

Vespri was created to support those who need to make strategic decisions in the engineering industry, without geographic boundaries. It does so by combining financial data, concrete case studies and constant monitoring of market trends — but also of what happens in the world beyond the companies themselves, because that is often where the pressures that shape their fate come from.

Proprietary datasets — public institutional monitoring for employment restructuring, public company financial statement data for margins and leverage, job-posting aggregators and recruiting portals with accredited data access for skills demand — read with the same stated methodology report after report, with caveats on limits always explicit in the body of the text, never relegated to a footnote nobody reads.

Why Vespri

Who runs the project

Vespri, and "Research and Reaction"

Reading the industry the way you read a balance sheet

Questions about the project, before reading the reports