A place and an experience like that of Fondazione Sacra Famiglia in Cesano Boscone still has much to say to a city like Milan and its Diocese. This exhibition allows visitors to delve into the ways in which the Church of Milan has understood and understands Charity, focusing on the last and most vulnerable. Based on this perspective, the exhibition is divided into three sections, opening with a group of photographs by Marianna Sambiase, who works as an educator at the Alzheimer Unit of RSA San Pietro, Fondazione Sacra Famiglia. Sambiase addresses the complex and sensitive topic of Alzheimer’s disease. Rather than on the facility or the treatments, her work focuses on the residents, their faces, gestures, suffering hands and little contradictions, showing how such vulnerable people continue to display a need for recognition that resonates with anyone who meets them. Photography thus becomes a tool for establishing a relationship, a sort of additional treatment in itself.
The exhibition continues by presenting the history of Sacra Famiglia through a series of shots taken in 1946 by photojournalist Enrico Zuppi (1909-1992). They showcase the years immediately after World War II, when Sacra Famiglia hosted, alongside the so-called ‘incurables of the countryside’ and people with severe disabilities, also war victims and orphans. Zuppi captures private moments and takes portraits and group shots with which he conveys emotions thanks to his straightforward style.
The third section displays a set of pictures by one of the greatest Italian photographers, Gianni Berengo Gardin (1930-2025), who in 2011 was invited to capture reality at Sacra Famiglia. With his mastery of black and white, Berengo Gardin narrates everyday life at the Casa – treatments, school, relationships, games. As well as giving an account of what happens at Fondazione Sacra Famiglia, his visual storytelling reveals a heartfelt involvement.
The project showcased in these halls retraces the history of Sacra Famiglia to spur reflection on the present, and most of all to urge each and every visitor to look at the others, even the most vulnerable ones, with their eyes open to the mystery that permeates every human.
