Exhibition
The Museo Diocesano presents the exhibition Do Not Forget. The work of Sacra Famiglia and Alzheimer’s care: created in collaboration with the Fondazione Sacra Famiglia di Cesano Boscone (Milan), one of Italy’s most important health and social care organisations, founded in 1896 and active in the field of disability, the exhibition presents 60 photographs by Enrico Zuppi, Gianni Berengo Gardin and Marianna Sambiase.
The exhibition is organised into three sections and begins with a core group of photographs taken by Marianna Sambiase, an educator in the Alzheimer’s Unit of the San Pietro care home (RSA) of the Fondazione Sacra Famiglia. Here Sambiase addresses the complex and delicate subject of Alzheimer’s disease without dwelling on care facilities or therapies, focusing instead on the people, their faces, their gestures, their suffering hands and their small inconsistencies, revealing how these deeply fragile individuals continue, ceaselessly, to express a need for recognition that speaks to everyone who meets them. In this way her photography becomes an instrument of relationship, a kind of extension of the patients’ care and identity.
The exhibition continues with a closer look at the history of Sacra Famiglia, told through a series of photographs taken in 1946 by the photojournalist Enrico Zuppi (1909–1992). These images bear witness to the years immediately following the Second World War, when Sacra Famiglia took in not only the so-called “incurables from the countryside” and people with severe disabilities, but also victims of the war and orphans. With a direct visual language, Zuppi creates portraits and captures private and communal moments capable of conveying universal emotions.
The third section presents a group of shots by a great master of Italian photography, Gianni Berengo Gardin (1930–2025), who in 2011 was invited to portray life at Sacra Famiglia. With his masterly black and white, Berengo Gardin takes on the everyday life of the Home – the therapies, the school, the relationships, the games. His account in images, as well as retracing what happens within the Foundation, reveals the deep sense of involvement shared by everyone who lives and works there.
The project presented at the Museum thus sets out to retrace the history of Sacra Famiglia in order to reflect on the present, but above all to encourage visitors to look at others – even the most defenceless – always placing emphasis on the mystery that dwells within every human being.
Main partner: Intesa Sanpaolo
