Francesco Faraci returns with a photographic project that is much more than a visual narrative. Palermo Madre is a declaration of love, a tear in the raw flesh of the South, a journey into the deepest and most uncomfortable soul of a city that both welcomes and rejects, that nurtures and wounds. A place that is a mother in the broadest sense of the term: saint and sinner, fragile and untamed.

Faraci dedicates this work “to the forgotten ones,” those whom society often marginalizes and stigmatizes, but who in his images become witnesses of a powerful, pulsating, and genuine humanity. His is a sidelong gaze, inspired by the figure of Danilo Dolci, an intellectual and activist who chose to live among the people, getting his hands and soul dirty. Just like Pasolini, Levi, or Don Tonino Bello—cited as guiding lights in this journey through the contradictions and truths of Palermo.

The city, told “from below,” becomes a laboratory of existence, where every face is a story, every child a possibility, every shadow a light to be nurtured. There is no self-indulgent aesthetic, no pursuit of beauty for beauty’s sake. There is the attempt to restore complexity, to give a voice to those without one. For Faraci, photography is never an innocent act, but a political gesture, a radical choice of closeness, exposure, and love.

Palermo Madre is also a personal reflection. An intimate letter to the South, to a daughter never born, to a friend who has passed, to all the rebirths after every shattering. It is the awareness that “fatherhood is much more than a filial matter” and that love, in the end, is the only way to survive with dignity.

In a time when everything tends toward uniformity, Faraci reminds us of the value of untimeliness, of listening, of being “where nothing happens, but only in appearance.” His photographs do not seek approval—they challenge. They are open wounds that speak to those brave enough to truly look.