AV Kerning

I noticed something odd in Faenza, Italy but unfortunately I barely documented it. For some reason, the letter pairs of AV & VA are often super kerned. The first few times I saw it, it seemed like an oddity, but eventually I was noticing it everywhere. It wasn’t always over kerned, but it was generally tighter than it needed to be (and tighter than the overall spacing of the rest of the letters).

The question now is: why? And is this phenomenon localized to this area of Italy? I don’t recall seeing this in the other Italian cities I’ve visited.