From January 24 to March 15, 2026, Palazzo Blu hosts the photography exhibition “UGANDA: Knowledge is health and freedom”. The exhibition – free admission – was born from the idea of documenting and raising awareness of the places and people of a rural area in South West Uganda – the Kyamuhunga region – where the testimony and humanitarian commitment of missionaries and Italian Catholic and lay volunteers since the last decades of the ‘900s are strong and tangible.
The images on display take shape from the reportage produced by Fabio Muzzi, a Sienese photojournalist, during the trips he made in September 2024 and 2025 to the places where the Comboni missionary father Father Paolino Tomaino (1937–2024) lived and worked. An intimate and collective journey, intertwining personal memory and visual testimony.
Father Paolino's life was guided by an idea as simple as it was radical and visionary: school and education as instruments of emancipation, health, and freedom. Convinced that knowledge was the most powerful weapon of redemption and transformation, Father Paolino dedicated his life to the most vulnerable, to children and adolescents, building schools, creating meeting places, shining the light of knowledge where it was lacking.
The exhibition was born from this vision and develops as a visual journey through streets, villages and faces marked by the missionary's passage. Photographs not only document places, but also reveal traces of a presence, of a silent and concrete action that has made education a foundation of dignity, autonomy, and hope. They tell stories of everyday life with immediacy and delicacy, conveying smiles, glances, and gestures that speak of resilience and the future. Every image is a concrete testimony: even in the most complex and difficult realities, it is possible to find the strength to smile, learn, and build a solid foundation for a better life, founded on knowledge and solidarity.
Photography, understood as the documentation of an instant, here becomes emotional language. Among the most emblematic shots stand out the scream of a newborn baby just born –a primary and irreducible sign of the explosive force of life– and the gaze of a child, profound and questioning, capable of establishing a silent dialogue with the observer. Images that condense the essence of the entire project: the fleeting moment, the complexity of the human experience, the intimacy of an encounter.
As the author says, every photograph is a return to that moment, to that light, to those sounds and emotions that resurface in the time of memory. Knowledge is health and freedom thus becomes not only an exhibition, but also a starting point for reflection on the universal value of education as a tool for individual and collective change.
The exhibition is also configured as an invitation to take up a legacy and to continue a path already started. On the occasion of the exhibition, some visual and documentary testimonies of the vaccination campaign “AGAINST HBV”, launched in September 2025 at St. Daniel Comboni Hospital in Kyamuhunga, a healthcare facility founded by Father Paolino.
The humanitarian project, coordinated by Dr. Barbara Coco (Pisan hepatologist) – part of the broader program promoted by the World Health Organization - is aimed at reducing maternal and child transmission of hepatitis B virus infection through concrete and ongoing health interventions in the area.
The initiative was made possible thanks to the support of the Pietro Ciccorossi Doctor Association (founded in memory of the Pisan hepatologist who passed away prematurely 10 years ago) and the contribution of numerous institutions and private donors in the city of Pisa.
In this context, the exhibition extends its horizon beyond the exhibition dimension, placing itself as a bridge between cultures, a space connecting memory, shared responsibility and action.
