Castello di Casole

As the first laureate of the photographic residency initiated by Belmond, Mexican photographer Cecy Young spent two weeks at Castello di Casole, a restored tenth-century castle set within a 3,200-acre estate in the Tuscan countryside. Surrounded by vineyards, olive groves and cypress-lined hills, the property—once the seasonal retreat of Italian film director Luchino Visconti—embodies a timeless blend of history, nature and quiet splendour. Trained as a painter before turning to photography, Young approaches her subjects with a painter’s sensitivity. Known for her fashion work with Dior Beauty, Chanel and Hermès, and for her editorials in Vogue Japan, Numéro Tokyo and Harper’s Bazaar Latin America, she brings to her images a poetic stillness and an intimate emotional resonance. During her residency, she wandered the estate without a script, guided only by light, texture and fleeting sensation. Her photographs reveal not a story but an atmosphere—a meditation on memory, time and the fragile beauty of the everyday. From shadows falling across an old chair to morning dew on a leaf, her vision captures both grace and impermanence, the delicate tension between reality and imagination. Her approach—intuitive, tender, and attuned to silence—aligns perfectly with Belmond’s As Seen By series, which invites contemporary photographers to move beyond documentary and offer deeply personal interpretations of place.