Adriana Turriziani is a key figure in Italian palliative medicine. She has combined clinical, teaching and research to develop an integrated model of care at the end of life, marked by ethics and respect for the person. His leadership roles and extensive scientific output reflect his commitment to promoting palliative care that is accessible, of high quality, and oriented toward the patient’s overall well-being. “Palliative care is a ‘revolutionary’ choice in a positive sense, because it preserves dignity, inclusiveness and quality of life, opposing the view of death as mere suppression of pain.” ” Medicine has many facets, but few are as deeply connected to the human as palliative care. They represent one of the highest expressions of medicine, because they do not seek healing at any cost but relief, quality of life, and accompaniment of the patient and family in the time of frailty. They concern not only the end of life, but every stage in which the disease is not curable but is still treatable, clinically, humanly, spiritually. It is an approach that places at the center not only the illness but, above all, the person, his or her experience, needs and hopes. Caring means, always, being there in front of that person, his fragility, his silent questions, in his specific life context. When physicians cannot change the course of advanced illness or advanced chronic condition, they can always change the way a person, adult or child, goes through them. Palliative care addresses the complexity of suffering; it represents a medicine that is also capable of presence, listening sharing, compassion and, above all, taking charge.”
Salvatore Tomai, a RAI television director and author since 1999, is a dear and participating presence in the Faito Doc Festival family. A graduate of DAMS in Bologna, he has over the years signed documentaries and specials for Rai 1, particularly for the program A Sua Immagine, with a sensitive look at spirituality and the human dimension. A fraternal friend of the Festival’s artistic directors, he and his wife Emilia share a deep human and artistic bond with them. Caterina, their beloved daughter, who passed away when she was only 9 years old, was maid of honor at Nathalie and Turi’s wedding: a simple gesture, but full of affection and memory. In his book A Smile in the Sky. Caterina’s Story, Salvatore recounts the pain of loss by transforming it into a tale of faith and light. “[My wife Emilia and I] watched Catherine fade away like a candle, slowly. And like a candle she gave off light around her, in a simple way: with silence, a look, a smile, a word or a small gesture of affection…” His words and their lives are discreet but powerful witnesses to that daily holiness that Pope Francis calls “ hidden ”; but no less luminous for that.
Antonella D’Amora (Pompei, 1988) is a singer, film scholar and longtime collaborator of the Faito Doc Festival, with which she has shared a deep and vital bond for years. After graduating from DAMS in Salerno and CITEM in Bologna, she developed a research that interweaves spirituality, audiovisual languages and personal experience. Her presence at the festival this year is an act of love and resistance. Her testimony, in the sign of the recent loss of her husband Antonino – also a close friend of many at the festival – becomes a gesture of contact between worlds, a threshold of transformation. In the silence of the Faito woods, her voice guards memory, welcomes the end and makes a living relationship with all of us.
