From 24 January to 15 March 2026, Palazzo Blu hosts the photographic exhibition “UGANDA: Knowledge is wealth and freedom.”
The exhibition – with free admission – was conceived with the aim of documenting and shedding light on the places and people of a rural area in south-western Uganda – the Kyamuhunga region – where, since the last decades of the 20th century, the humanitarian commitment and testimony of Italian Catholic and secular missionaries and volunteers have been strong and tangible.
The images on display stem from the reportage created by Fabio Muzzi, a photojournalist from Siena, during his travels in September 2024 and 2025 to the places where Comboni missionary Father Paolino Tomaino (1937–2024) lived and worked. An intimate yet collective journey, intertwining personal memory and visual testimony.
Father Paolino’s life was guided by an idea that was at once simple, radical, and visionary: school and education as tools of emancipation, health, and freedom. Firmly convinced that knowledge was the most powerful instrument for redemption and transformation, Father Paolino devoted his life to the most vulnerable, to children and adolescents, building schools, creating spaces for encounter, and bringing the light of learning where it was lacking.
The curator – Alessandro Pingitore – explains that the exhibition arises from this vision and unfolds as a visual journey through roads, villages, and faces marked by the missionary’s passage. The photographs do not merely document places; they convey traces of a presence, of a quiet yet concrete action that made education a foundation of dignity, autonomy, and hope. They tell, with immediacy and delicacy, stories of everyday life, capturing smiles, gazes, and gestures that speak of resilience and the future. Each image is a tangible testimony: even in the most complex and difficult realities, it is possible to find the strength to smile, to learn, and to build solid foundations for a better life, grounded in knowledge and solidarity.
Photography, understood as the documentation of an instant, here becomes an emotional language. Among the most emblematic images are the cry of a newborn just brought into the world – a primary and irreducible sign of the overwhelming force of life – and the deep, questioning gaze of a young girl, capable of establishing a silent dialogue with the viewer. Images that encapsulate the essence of the entire project: the fleeting moment, the complexity of human experience, the intimacy of an encounter.
As the author explains, each photograph is a return to that moment, that light, those sounds and emotions that resurface over time in memory. Knowledge Is Health and Freedom thus becomes not only an exhibition, but also an invitation to reflect on the universal value of education as a tool for individual and collective change.
The exhibition also presents itself as an invitation to embrace a legacy and to continue a path already begun. On the occasion of the exhibition, several visual and documentary testimonies of the vaccination campaign “AGAINST HBV”are presented. The campaign was launched in September 2025 at the St. Daniel Comboni Hospital in Kyamuhunga, a healthcare facility founded by Father Paolino.
The humanitarian project, coordinated by Dr. Barbara Coco (a hepatologist from Pisa) and included within the broader programme promoted by the World Health Organization, aims to reduce mother-to-child transmission of hepatitis B virus infection through concrete and continuous healthcare interventions in the local area.
The initiative was made possible thanks to the support of the Associazione Dottore Pietro Ciccorossi (founded in memory of the Pisan hepatologist who passed away prematurely ten years ago) and the contribution of numerous institutions and private donors from the city of Pisa.
In this context, the exhibition extends its horizon beyond the purely exhibition dimension, positioning itself as a bridge between cultures and as a space of connection between memory, shared responsibility, and action.