World Press Freedom Day, 3 May, marked the launch of the fourth edition of the Daphne Caruana Galizia Prize for outstanding journalism promoting or defending the fundamental principles and values of the European Union, such as freedom, human dignity, democracy, equality, the rule of law and human rights. The Prize will be awarded in October 2024, in symbolic memory of the date on which Daphne Caruana Galizia, a Maltese journalist and blogger, was murdered. She is the editor of one of the most followed blogs in Malta, she is involved in numerous investigations and she is active against corruption, which is why she was murdered in a bomb attack near her home. In 2017 you were the first to denounce the involvement of the Maltese politicians Konrad Mizzi and Keith Schembri in the trafficking described in the Panama Paperswork that earned her the Pulitzer Prize in 2017.
This year, after the official invitation from the organization of the prestigious award, the photojournalist Giacomo Palermo participates with his publication of the photographic and textual reportage in various languages on Fartel Biagio Conte in the Holy See newspaper l’Osservatore Romano entitled “DIO MAKES NO PREFERENCE” – ‘One year after the death of brother Biagio Conte’ to continue to spread the “Hope & Charity” foundations of the “Mission of Hope and Charity” on an international level.
Giacomo Palermo is a photojournalist, visual communicator and unconventional blogger who deals with sociological and humanitarian research in the Mediterranean area. He has collaborated with L’OBSERVATORE ROMANO (newspaper published in the Vatican City), Getty Images Inc., Touring Club Italia, Majority World CIC – Global – Photo Agency, The MEGA Agency – LLC, GEDI Spa Gruppo Editoriale, La Repubblica, National Geographic Italy, La Sicilia, La Discussione, Aleteia.org, America Oggi, La Voce di New York, Splash News, CrossInMedia Foundation and other international magazines. He is a volunteer missionary at the “Mission of Hope and Charity” in Palermo, founded by his lay brother Biagio Conte. Winner in 2015 of the Special Prize of the Italian Federation of Photographic Associations dedicated to the most influential Italian humanitarian photographer Tina Modotti. In 2021 his project “TerrA MAGNUM (Mediterranean)” was included in “The Magnum Connect Program” of the most important and prestigious photographic agency in the world, Magnum Photos. He obtained the scholarship from the “ITALY – USA Foundation” for the diplomatic master’s degree in “Leadership for International Relations and Made in Italy”. He has exhibited in collective photography exhibitions such as in the “International Photography Center” in Palermo founded by Letizia Battaglia.
Biagio Conte, the Angel of the Last was an Italian and Mediterranean lay missionary. Already a hermit, also known as Brother Biagio, he founded the “Mission of Hope and Charity” in Palermo to try to respond to the dramatic situations of poverty and marginalization of the people of his native town first and of immigrants then, guaranteeing without socio-cultural distinctions the “Principles of Universal Human Rights” and “the United Nations 2030 Agenda”; he dedicated his life to it and to evangelization. On 16 January 2014 it was announced that Biagio Conte, who had been confined to a wheelchair for years due to the crushing of some vertebrae, had already started walking again the previous summer after an immersion in the waters of Lourdes, an event for which the doctors themselves “could not provide a plausible scientific explanation”. On January 12, 2023, due to a serious form of colon cancer that he had been fighting for some time, he died in Palermo at the age of 59. The previous day, despite being seriously debilitated, he had insisted on attending Mass, where he had been carried on a stretcher to receive the Eucharist. The missionary was buried in the “Citadel of the Poor and Hope” in Via Decollati in Palermo. Among the many messages of condolence that arrived after his death, there was also that of Pope Francis, who defined him as a “generous missionary of charity and friend of the poor”, and of the President of the Italian Republic, Sergio Mattarella, who praised his “engaging and heroic” testimony in defense of “Human Dignity”. The “Mission of Hope and Charity” is the greatest gift that Brother Biagio Conte left to Palermo and to the entire community. With the premature death of Brother Biagio, the leadership of the Mission passed to Don Pino Vitrano, co-founder and spiritual guide. Since its birth in 1991 under the porticoes of the Central Station of the Sicilian capital, the Mission has been committed to welcoming and giving itself to the new poor of Palermo, that is, to all those who remain behind and on the margins of this indifferent society. They are called vagabonds, young drifters, alcoholics, ex-convicts, separated people, refugee prostitutes, immigrants, but in the Community they are all called brother and sister. According to the Italian sociologist and UNESCO representative who studies the United Nations 2030 Agenda in Italy, prof. Aurelio Angelini: “immigration has become a macro-social phenomenon in a Europe which has found itself welcoming ever-increasing numbers of foreigners, and we are witnessing the presence of second, or even third generation immigrants, but this is the story today, but Sicily in past centuries is a land of emigrants and migrants, it is a land of Mediterranean peoples, an example of coexistence of people from different cultural components who have generated a Mediterranean-European civilization as well as in the “Mission of Hope and Charity” in Palermo founded by the lay missionary Brother Biagio Conte, unique in its kind on an international level”. The ten-year reportage of the photojournalist Giacomo Palermo immortalizes the daily life of the friar and of the entire Mission and is the representation of the human, the contrast and synthesis that allow us to visit this Mediterranean Community without moving and experience extraordinary emotions.
Agrigento Oggi editorial team
Agrigento Oggi editorial team
